When the PvP ladders first came out, I thought it was a GREAT idea! Here’s a bone for those that are unable to hit top 100 every week, or literally ever. AND you are competing against other people not in your bracket, so you don’t have that revenge against you when you slide into placing! And the different leagues make it easy for newer players and low level players to participate.
Instead what I find is that my ladder is frequently filled with top25 making it even worse than the top 100, because if I participate in PvP I’m stuck in the diamond league therefore never placing in either bracket.
It takes me a full season to get 150k VP to get the mythic. Right now, with 1 day left for the week even, my ladder is occupied by 214k, 205k, and 163k.
I’m tired of playing that game of trying to get above 6500 for the full week’s rewards, but less 8500 (right now) to be relegated.
Best fix: Top 100 get kicked from all Ladders except their own at reset every day (except for start) and the ladder is back filled randomly from other ladders
Easiest fix: Relegation Zone for Diamond League is 11th place and lower.
If Ladders is working as intended, I’ll eat my words and just suck it up, continuing to fall asleep easy each night as the tears formed from the impossible nature of ever achieving my Ladder goals dry and crust my eyes shut, blocking out the horrors of the outside world for one more night. …But this can’t possibly be working as intended can it?
I’m hoping anyone can chime in and let me know I’m not crazy, and if lucky, a dev acknowledgment that it’s a problem that’s being worked on
You get paired with people in a bracket who are way more active then you are. That is apparently a RNG situation we can not influence. You can try to get more active here yourself. But yeah, 160k points a week is already a lot of time investment and I can see why some people not do it. Even worse if the real active masochists are showing up. Or the plain botters, to reach 7000 matches at the end of the week. Casuals can’t breach that. So knowing when to throw the towel for a bracket fight on Wednesday/Thursday, is something you have to learn by knowing what you can manage in a week.
The other problem I read around your lines, is that you score next to nothing in a week. 150.000 takes you a whole season? Dude, that problem is on you. Either you don’t have much time, or you have crap teams or you don’t know how to score more points from the games you can squeeze into a day. Maybe a combination of all factors. But that is definitly a problem. If you would make 10k points a day with like 2h of play, you would have 70k points at the end of the week. Not enough for a rough bracket placing, but it should you push at least ahead for the Alliance ranking and mean that by week#2 the 150k rank unlock for PvP shop is near finished.
On that note: DO NOT buy the Goldmark Mythic. The Mythic will show up in the Soulforge later, for Diamonds. Which are the way easier resource. Goldmarks are plain to valuable. So
buy Goldmark PvP pets. One of each, until you own all. Not more. Use pet-orbs to level them up.
buy Dragonite for goldmarks. In case you need to do the dragon-egg chains.
buy Random Books of Deeds if the other two options are done. This is a good way to get books, and with that level up your Kingdoms for stat boni.
Don’t get me wrong, the whole bracket thing is flawed as hell. Did you know that the people your see in your bracket, will each have different brackets they see themselves? You feel like you fight the people in your bracket, but they all see very different numbers and names. So they compete against something else entirely, which sometimes explains why some names will push higher and higher even if the bracket outcome might already been clear middle of the week.
There is also a generic strategy by a lot of people to push very very hard the first weeks in a season. They all want to reach 480.000 VP for alliance rank early [1 goldmark each day. Top rank with 800.000 would be 5 goldmarks each day], and get the maximum out of it with like 60 days of the season left. I tried that strategy once, and yeah, worked. But it really stressful to play that much the first weeks. The point is that “casuals” with some bad luck pairing will have no real chances the first week because of this.
I would argue that making “real brackets” were people fight the same names during a week, might make things more fair overall and should probably balance thinsg better in the leagues/brackets. But then I guess you would have enough people complaining about competition problems too. Overall, the devs don’t see very keen on fixing the problem. Hell, we hardly get them to fix Guild Wars, which should have a higher priority :-/
PvP leagues and the Global leaderboard should be unrelated. Period. When you reach Diamond league it should be like PvP goals (where you can get 80 gold marks as long as you get 6500 VP). Maybe if you got 20,000 for the week, you would get 100 gold marks from a Diamond PvP league?
I know that’s not perfect, but I think everyone is tired of competing in 2 leaderboards every. Single. Week. And I already tried going up and down from Ruby and Diamond, and that even that got frustrating. Enough is enough.
I’ve found that I simply do not have the time – i.e., I will not put in the necessary number of hours and battles – to remain competitive in a Diamond League bracket. That it’s simply too difficult and too much effort to put up a score that would have me capable of earning any sort of end-of-week rewards there.
On the other hand, I’ve found it takes minimal time and effort to finish “in the money” in a Ruby League bracket. Even if I’m not interested in doing much more than my “dailies”, that being my sigil fights at a Fortress under siege (4-5 fights plus the Guardian) and the gold mark regions the next day, that being the spots where Gold Marks are rewarded for play.
So I alternate every week. If I’m in a Diamond League bracket, I do the dailies against the lowest-VP opposition and never use a VP-doubling item. If I’m in a Ruby League bracket, I’ll pick the highest-VP opposition that I can quickly/easily defeat – my sanity would prefer fewer VP against a “zombie bot” opponent rather than facing somebody with a powered mythic and Elementalist hero even if it meant a larger score – and I’ll use a VP-doubling item if the numbers are high enough to justify the limited item.
I’m playing PvP for the Gold Marks and the “free rewards” from the season-long path, because those are the limited resources. Even if I spent 100 burning marks yesterday and received a grand total of ZERO Immortal Souls for my efforts and aggravation.
As for what @Red_Dox says about about the seasonal mythic? I figure they’re there for those players who either have way more Gold Marks than they know what to do with or for “lesser” players who already have all their kingdoms maxx’ed and therefore don’t need to spend on Deeds (Imperial or Books) and need something else to sink them into. Because, the way I figure it, I probably earn something in the rough vicinity of 3000 Gold Marks per season as a fully F2P player before adding in whatever shows up from Guild Wars or from the developers screwing up and sending out a “we’re so very sorry!” compensation. So if I weren’t buying Deeds, I could probably buy the mythic. Or a pile of Dragonite, if I still need that. But it’s so far into the future that I won’t even concern myself with it now.
