When asked, most average players can only tell you the surface of what they see after observing a match. They look for the obvious and only see things like class makeup, basic strategy execution. This is one of the main reasons why a lot of players can actually watch a world class team play, such as Pandemic or TFO, then walk away saying things like “They were lucky”, “They had easy competition”, “They didn’t do anything I couldn’t have done”, or the worst of them all “They just had better partners”. Hearing these amateur comments are quite disappointing. These ignorant comments only show how little most players understand the game in-depth. Instead of actually learning from these skilled players and taking advantage of this opportunity to improve themselves, they end up making excuses for why they weren’t the one that was in their places instead.

So what exactly separates top of the line arena players and the average PvPers? To answer this lets take a look at why the average players don’t make it to the top. There’s two main ways to lose a game. They could have either lost because of their own mistakes, or you could have lost because your opponents were vastly superior to you.

The first way of losing is broken down to having one or more of the following mistakes, such as wrong method of playing, the wrong attitude or lack of focus, and also poor execution such as mistimed interrupts, bad timing on cooldowns usage, or slow reaction to key actions(fear, stun, blind, etc.). Another way you could have lost is due to being plainly out played or out lucked. For example, the other player/team executes a tactic or strategy you or your team were not prepared for, they score chains of crit and resist, or their strategy was just better overall. The main goal in improving yourself and your team is to learn from your mistakes.

Practice makes perfection. There’s a reason why this popular saying made its way to so many places. However there’s a little twist in this, are you practicing the right way? Did you know practicing with the wrong methods could actually hinder your performance? It is important to practice with the right players and the right competition. It is also important to always take it seriously when practicing and playing every single match. For example: jumping players in battlegrounds while you have them out numbered does not improve your skills, attacking someone who’s AFK or unprepared does not improve your skills; Using a different strategy then you normally would in an arena game just because they are a “horrible” geared team will not help.

There are way too many players whom put in more time than many of the championship caliber teams in battlegrounds, yet they come into the arena scene and get demolished. Ever heard someone say “I do just fine in battlegrounds and world PvP, but somehow I get destroyed in arena, it makes no sense!”? Well that is the perfect example of practicing under the wrong conditions. To start things off, battlegrounds create a very bad habit for most players. The fact that you get resurrected every 30 seconds makes dying not big of a deal if any at all. Players are actually encouraged to ‘suicide’ into the opposing faction in order to delay or complete certain objectives. This is a terrible way to condition the average player into getting used to real PvP combat.

So what is the right way of training? Stay tuned for Part 2 of Closing the Gap.

Tags: General · Articles

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