How 2 sPvP
For the record, this isn't a mechanics post! This is a new kind of post: a psychology one.
sPvP is already a big thing in Guild Wars 2. Even somebody like me, who's never really been interested in PvP most of the time (save for one game and one server, on which I dominated the PvP rankings and took great pleasure in doing so) has found that GW2 has an sPvP system I can really appreciate.
I'm also going to be the first to admit I'm not a professional PvPer, I'm not super awesome at it, and my sPvP experience is far less than my PvE experience. But I firmly believe that I have some tips and some tricks to offer for anybody who wants to get into sPvP.
Especially if you're somebody like me who hasn't done it often, and if you're somebody like me who is often quite cynical and thinks that we're letting our team down. To anybody like me out there, this is for you.
Play to Win, or Play to Learn?
The first rule of any PvP is that you can always improve. Always. Whether you win a match or whether you lose a match, you did at least one thing wrong and you can improve your gameplay by evaluating what you did during the match, and then being pragmatic about reviewing it.
There are pro players, it's true. I'm not going to sit here and say there's not because even though GW2 tries to tailor itself to everybody and reduce the amount of "pro" that you can find, there's still going to be people who play amazingly at their chosen classes. They far outshine people newer to sPvP and they dominate in their own respective ways.
These people do exist.
But you know, they didn't start off that way, and if they claim that they were always natural at PvP and just started off as good as they are, they're lying. (And they have terrible attitudes, so drop it like it's hot!)
The trick when you get into sPvP, particularly if you are newer and not quite as competitive, is to remember two golden rules.
Play for fun.
Play to learn.
If you go into a match and do your best, but always remember that you can improve on every performance you have, you won't feel quite so jaded if you happen to lose. If anything, looking at losing with a positive attitude is the number one way of improving in the first place!
When you fail, examine why. There's always something you can do better. And the next time you fail, make sure you fail better.
It almost sounds cynical, but I promise you it isn't. Accepting that losing is a part of winning is the best way you're going to have fun in your PvP, no matter whether you win or lose, and it is the best way to ensure that you have an open mind that is able to learn from mistakes, improve on them, and make you a learning machine.
Your team mates are not your responsibility
Although you are expected to work as a team, and by all rights you should be, the responsibility for your team mates doesn't lie directly with you. (This even goes for team leaders.)
Organisation is a group thing and all of you should be striving to work together as a unit because in this way the match will hopefully stay in your favour, but never believe for a second that the performance of your team is your own responsibility. How they perform is ultimately their decision, and while I would recommend professional tournament teams sit down and discuss their wins and their losses in a friendly environment so they can better work upon structure, I'd never recommend anybody take responsibility for somebody else's actions.
If you go down, and you call your team mates for help and they don't arrive on time?
Don't blame them. You have no real idea what their circumstances were when they were trying to get to you.
Don't blame yourself. Mistakes like this happen and this is how we learn.
Recognise that your responsibility came to an end when you were downed.
Taking the above situation a step further, here's how you should look at it:
I went down, and my team mates couldn't reach me. Why did I go down? I should examine why I was downed and then work to prevent this in the next match.
You should not say:
I went down and my team mates didn't reach me. We need to work on team mates reaching each other when members are downed.
The more you Play, the more you Pro
Let's be honest, the only way you're going to really get better is not just by doing the above, but is by playing. Practise does make perfect. If you only PvP once in a blue moon, then you are unintentionally stonewalling your own ability to improve (even if you approach those games with the right attitude.)
If you don't play very often, you cannot realistically expect to improve at all. Although theory says that you should still improve over a slow period of time, the actual truth when it comes to PvP is that this is a lie - if you only play one match every month you aren't actually going to improve! You will play all of those single matches each month at the same level, because in between those matches, you never strive to try and get better.
It's a harsh way to look at it, isn't it? But it's sadly very true.
If you don't practise, you don't get better, and if you don't get better, you're probably less inclined to practise, because you've been conned into believing that you should be improving with every match you play.
The facts are that you only improve with every match you play if you can dedicate time to playing several matches in a row, every possible opportunity you can. The reason for this is that you will find it far easier to spot the mistakes you make the more matches in succession that you play. If you only play one match, you never realistically know where you are going wrong, because you either win or you lose and that's that. You don't get variety, which in turn means you don't learn.
If you play three matches in a row every day and outline what you did in a notepad somewhere, and whether you ultimately won or lost, you will eventually start seeing things in your notes that tell you where you may be making mistakes.
The more you play, the easier it is for you to snap your fingers and say "You know, I just did that wrong." In fact, you can even begin to do this during gameplay if you really start to get good at it! Recognising faults and flaws during your matches and making a note of them will help you improve far faster - but you can only get to that stage of awareness if you play regularly, and play competitively to some extent.
Be Open about your Mistakes
PvP has taught us on a subconscious level that mistakes are to be ashamed of, because they are what make you lose. And, because losing is not something anybody actively strives to do, this means that mistakes are instantly bad. The elite of PvP will often get snobbish and snark at those who make mistakes and, as they would say, "cost them the match."
But if you remember the golden rule - the rule that you are always going to make a mistake and can always improve on it - then you would know they're all talking crap.
You cannot cost your team the match. It isn't possible - certainly not in GW2 - to cost your team a match in sPvP, be it PUG or tournament. If somebody is telling you that you did cost them the match, they are lying to you and beyond that, probably lying to themselves.
Mistakes aren't a bad thing! We have been conditioned to see them as bad because we have also been conditioned to believe that losing is something you should be ashamed of, and this is not true. Your mistakes aren't good, no, but they are not bad. They are simply mistakes, and the only way you'll learn and improve is by making them. Don't look back at matches and sneer at yourself when you see that you did something wrong, because that negative connotation on mistakes will actually make you far more blind to them.
That guy who told you that you cost him the match? He sneers at mistakes too.
And he's probably not as good as you think he is if he has that kind of an attitude, because it means he isn't looking at the things he did wrong during that match so that he can improve too. If anybody is costing him the match, it's actually himself!
Losing does suck, but it isn't anything to be ashamed of, and especially not in a system where not one single person can "lose" a match all on their own.
Look at your failures with a grain of salt and see them not as something that makes you a bad player, but as something that means you are a player who can improve. Look at your losses not as a sign that you suck at PvP and shouldn't do it, but that you have a lot of progression to make. The better you get (and if your team employs the same psychology advice as you do) you will eventually start to win more than you lose.
And speaking of that...
Don't let those wins get to your head, either. Elitism ruins the game for everybody, and is the exact reason that guides like this even need to exist. Telling somebody that they suck because they made a couple of mistakes isn't nice, and you shouldn't do it, because you used to be just like them! Instead, make sure people know that you don't mind if they make a mistake. Make sure they know that they aren't under pressure to do everything right, and you might just find that they perform so much better without that pressure looming over them!
Games are for fun. Being competitive can be fun too! But you have to remember that this is only a game, and at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if you're super good, or just average. The only thing that matters is if you truly want to get better, and have the desire to improve.