Feedback:User/Widowmaker/Heroes' Ascent

Heroes' Ascent
User	Widowmaker
Categories	Player vs. Player → Heroes' Ascent

Everyone knows, Heroes Ascent has been destroyed by Rank elitism. This isn't directly something ANet has caused, it's down to the players, admittedly, but it's something in their power to stop.

The Problem

New players to HA are generally not that good, and many players are just bad and don't listen even if you try to help them. For this reason, having the rank system seems like a good idea to let good players pick other good players to form good teams... in theory. However, thanks to grinding and overpowered flavour-of-the-month builds, there are many bad high-ranked players, and not all low-ranked players are bad. In other words, while there's a correlation between rank and skill, it's nowhere near as strong as it's "supposed" to be.

This makes it very hard for new players to get into HA, because the only teams who will let them in are usually not the greatest, and won't win much.

The Bigger Problem

Some players are just idiots. Many times, I've seen people be incredibly nasty to someone purely because of their rank. Not even "you have no rank so you're no good, get out of my team" but "you have no rank so you have no skill or experience and also you're a <insert offensive name here>". It's not unbalanced skills which are destroying this game, it's bad players, because they seriously anger and annoy and sometimes really upset other players.

The Solution

ANet can do nothing about the root causes of this problem, which are human stupidity and nastiness. However, they can stop these things from ruining their game. Ideally, they would just ban all the idiots who abuse the rank system, but this isn't practical. Instead, many other ideas have been suggested, such as:

• A low-level HA for low-ranked folks to get them into it more easily.
• Rank-based team matching
• Rank-based rewards (so low-ranked people can gain more rank faster)
• Removing the visibility of the Hero title altogether

The last option is probably the most drastic, and many high-ranked people would probably dislike it, but it's better than what we have now.

Actually do something

To be honest, any of these things would be an improvement. I just urge ANet actually to do something. This is not a new problem, and if they don't want their playerbase to be further eaten away at by the cantakerous rot that's formed, they should do something about it!

Some common responses

• "You're just bitter because a high-ranked team wouldn't let you in"

We've all heard this before, and we all know that high-ranked teams aren't always even that good. It's not even a case of getting a team any more, it's the abuse that follows which is getting serious. ANet can't change player attitudes but they can discourage certain ones.

• "Get a PvP (HA) guild and they'll soon help you get to R3"

That all well and good, but some people have their own guilds they are happy with. They shouldn't have to leave them just because they want to try a bit of PvP.

• "HA is supposed to take a lot of dedication to get into"

This was always meant to be a game where grinding wasn't the focus. Spending hours to get a team together and play only to lose most of your matches because nobody good and with a rank will join your team isn't fun, and makes the fame rate so low that to get to R3 requires many many hours of grinding. That doesn't sound like a game to me, it sounds like a punishment.

• "HA is an elite area. Not everyone needs to be able to play it"

A highly elitist response. Everyone payed the same money for the game, eveyone should be able to have a go. OK, not everyone need do well or even win that often, but getting slagged off as a person because you don't have the hours of free time to grind through HA is not on. Furthermore, many people find HA more enjoyable than, say, RA where your success is partially (mostly) random, and they shouldn't be denied this because they didn't start playing it years ago.

• "Stop whining n00b"

You're probably exactly the kind of idiot who's ruining the game for everyone else.

In conclusion

Really, I think everyone knows the problem, and I think most people could think of something which would at least improve the situation. What we need is some kind of action, I don't really care what. You could just give this to your most junior employee's youngest primary-school-age-or-older relative and implement whatever they suggest without looking at it and it'd probably be an improvement, to be honest.

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