Leveling the playing field in instanced PvP

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And Ashes is literally that game. And it takes inspiration from exactly such games.

Most people in L2's arenas fought in cross-class battles instead of inner-class ones. People had different lvls of gear and different rps matchups in pretty much every single fight. At the start of the ladder season you'd get a certain amount of points and would then get matched up against people with roughly the same amount (as long as there was enough of players to do that).

If you fell too low due to your shitty gear, you still had chances against weaker rps matchups, and if you were at the top - you could still get brought down by a stronger rps enemy (if player skill was equal).

But L2's arenas gave a ton of tangible rewards for people who performed well, so most players understood that they had to properly level up and equip their character if they wanted to compete. And in order to do that they had to both pve and pvp in the open world (cause, you know, it was a pvx game).

And you know what people did to have a fun casual pvp in "equal" gear? Just went to a local open world arena location and fought each other there. Guilds practiced there when they wanted and trained their weaker players in pvp too. And quite often it'd be a fun and social event. This type of stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9EHmL-1uM

p.s. for the love of fucking god, remove my ping from your messages. I've gotten 21 fucking pings from yall.

Here's what seems quite unfair to me. You're asking for something "for free" that pretty much everyone else has to work very hard to get for themselves. You want high end pvp content w/o any time investment, while literally every other high end content in the game requires you to put in hundreds of hours to even get to, let alone participate in.

Why must I spend thousands of hours to get the chance to fight the epic end game boss (which includes pvping another guild for it), while you can just make a character spend 5 minutes on it and immediately go pvp in the best possible gear? How is that fair exactly?

I'm completely fine with arenas having a gear ceiling which is lower than the open world's one (literally what L2 did), but if you want to participate in an mmo's high end content - go play the mmo. I'm glad that GW2 provides a game where you can just play pvp w/o playing the mmo, but Ashes is not trying to take that particular design choice as its inspiration, so GW can be for lobby pvpers as what Ashes is trying to be for the open world pvpers - a game that others can send you to when you ask for that gameplay in a game that's not built for it.

We have not received permission from Blindside to share the quoted post.

No it doesn't, because to you that pvp is already your preferred end game content. And you can participate in it w/o any investment, while everyone else has to play for much longer to reach their preferred end game.

We have not received permission from Blindside to share the quoted post.

You have literally posted a quote that states "esports is not the goal". Byproducts of design may rise up on their own, but Intrepid has not shown any desire to make esports-like gameplay a viable way to play the game.

And as the same wiki page points out, there's currently no intention to provide gear as a pvp reward, which means that "purely pvp gameplay" is also not an intended way to play the game. But what you're suggesting is exactly that - a purely pvp gameplay. Which brings us back to the good ol' meme of "this game might not be for you".

We have not received permission from Blindside to share the quoted post.

This is both counterintuitively incorrect AND not relevant to Ashes.

Since gear can be traded in Ashes, any eSports org would simply have more players from whom they could source gear for their mainline members.

And, similarly, since Ashes 'as an eSport' would probably be both 'bracketed' and 'team based', it is unlikely that they would NOT have a hundred/thousand hour requirement, as that is what many games require to enter the skill bracket where you are part of the 'competitive tier'.

That said, you would still be able to compete in related brackets.

So if there is a 'level 30 bracket' all you would need is 'enough other people to give you good level 30 gear' and your skill and you have the 'standard outcome'.

Well, I'd like to make the further point that in a game with complex builds, no matter what you do, any change whatsoever to my character is not 'leveling the playing field' at all, even if my opponent must also change.

It's just perpetuating the same thing you were mentioning before.

It typically takes 3 hours to un-train muscle memory after a small patch for my character.

Another 8 to retrain any new muscle memory.

Another 6-10 to retrain any tactical change.

My ships in another game where I have complete control of them, require me to train separately for flying them with 'cargo hold full' and 'cargo hold empty'. 10-15% accuracy loss on railguns if the wrong amount of items are in the cargo hold and I don't do a 3-step thing to 'reset the flight curve' on literally every merge/joust/whatever.

If any form of gear equalization adds even 1s of Cooldown to a single ability, or loses one point of health regen per tick... things have shifted.

I don't doubt that for many people this would still be a good eSport, after all, MOBAs exist, but those are built around players practicing counterplay BUILDING and strategies, and progressions through matches.

Ashes Arenas would not be very similar to this for most people, being 'based on' the main game world, and therefore equalization of gear would be such a monumental task (if they wished to avoid the problem) as to be pointless.

Surely, it would have the potential to create a subset of players who learn how to play 'within the equalized gear mode' well, but the skill type represented by that subset of players might not be at all representative of the main game's skilled players. And I suspect that Intrepid would not want THAT.