Guild Wars 2

How do you approach balancing?

I don’t mean with number crunching, making something equal to something else. As balancing is much more than that. Fun (is it fun?), versitility (How many uses does it have?), usability (How easily is it used?), viability (How useful is this?) are all factors to consider.

My question is: What do you do when you have something useless?

To give a more realistic response, in a literal programming analogy, any programming or bug issues are more than likely added to a “queue” of things that already exist, and then the things that get addressed are prioritized both by how pressing it is to fix it and how easy it is to make the fix.

Making number changes is easy enough, for instance. But re-purposing skills and traits, changing attack speeds and animations, and in general, making any sort of change that has a direct impact on the physical world as far as how things work or interact with the environment, these are all difficult and time consuming changes to implement.

Not to be an apologist though. I find myself equally as frustrated with the process as anybody else.

But, ANet is working with only a handful of balance developers on staff (that we’re aware of) and made the promise of “no downtime for server maintenance and updates” which means that all the changes that get made have to be ready to not break the game at all when they go live, which is extremely limiting to their ability to test how things will work on the servers once they go live since their is no maintenance time to iron everything out (as it could work perfectly fine on the test servers).

Not to mention having to work with art and design teams for anything that changes the physical world of the game (how skills look or cast and animate, etc), and any other hidden red tape that us players aren’t aware of the constricts the balance team to how exactly much they are allowed to alter when they make changes.

So realistically, while we would all love to make a list of things and say “these are the things need changing” (which the forums do quite often anyhow), we have to remember that we aren’t just dealing with the developers, but a corporation and a business with a business model and operating standards for the employees.

Because given the state of the game, I seriously doubt that the devs sleep easy at night feeling like there isn’t any more they could do to make the game objectively “better.” There is just likely nothing they can immediately do in their given situations, and as a developer, that would probably drive most of them crazy going “it’s right here, I can fix it with few keystrokes, PLEASE LET ME FIX IT” only to not be capable of doing so do to job constraints.

Nova Stiker.8396:

How do you approach balancing?

I don’t mean with number crunching, making something equal to something else. As balancing is much more than that. Fun (is it fun?), versitility (How many uses does it have?), usability (How easily is it used?), viability (How useful is this?) are all factors to consider.

My question is: What do you do when you have something useless?

Anet will never answer these kind of questions because they’d be flamed back as hell..
just realize this game have lost much of it’s good and simply play for fun when other games are offline

I can’t believe that my post got infracted for just saying that the devs just ignore useless skills and traits. I’m just calling it the way I see it. Every profession has skills and trait that are worthless or bugged and have been that way since launch.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s the guys telling the devs what to do that are ignoring these.

I once got infracted because there was a post about some kind of bug with aquiring an item for a plant backpiece, which got a dev reply under 30 minutes!

While the large bug list for Mesmer and Thief never got a reply at all.

Heck, the plant bug got fixed within a day .