Guild Wars 2

What kind of data would you use to adjust profession balance in Guild Wars 2?

I was trading notes with a friend following the last Skill Bar episode. We were trying to figure out what data would really tell what kinds of changes were needed for what professions.

The forums are full of posts making claims about professions, but it’s really hard to get to the truth. There’s so many variables that can go into a fight that even dozens of fights from one person’s perspective don’t prove much.

So what data that Anet could actually collect would you use to make profession adjustments?

Here are a few things that seem like they might be valuable.
- Gather data only from players who play regularly in each game mode (so find players who are playing several hours per week in PVE, PVP, and WvW)
- Look at the numbers of those professions playing in each of the game modes
- Look at the equipment and traits used most commonly
- Try to find a measure of success (maybe leaderboard score in pvp, perhaps some kind of xp gained per time in PVE, maybe wvw xp gained in wvw)

In a perfect world, ANet would just use a standard top down approach on QA on identifying problems.

How much active time played has each profession?
In what type is the respective profession played how frequently?
What are the most commonly used traits, utility and weapons in the different game modes?
What are the least frequently used traits, utility and weapons in all game modes?

And than they should take the last question for the least played profession in its least played game mode and start fixing this. After that they can balance the more frequently used stuff.

Rinse repeat, welcome to the never ending cycle of balancing in an MMO.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

In a perfect world, ANet would just use a standard top down approach on QA on identifying problems.

How much active time played has each profession?
In what type is the respective profession played how frequently?
What are the most commonly used traits, utility and weapons in the different game modes?
What are the least frequently used traits, utility and weapons in all game modes?

And than they should take the last question for the least played profession in its least played game mode and start fixing this. After that they can balance the more frequently used stuff.

Rinse repeat, welcome to the never ending cycle of balancing in an MMO.

This isn’t actually that standard, although it is very logical and ideal. This keeps everything fresh and “in the meta” because if it falls off, it gets put onto the priority fix-list.

Also, it feels like a lot of their… lack of making changes is due to them, Anet, not wanting to admit to making a mistake. This trait is underused? It’s the players fault, it’s fine number-wise! This utility is underused? It has it’s niche use, even if we (both Anet and playerbase) can’t find it, right?!

And that’s why we’ve gotten to the point where we get 6 month patches that “fix” these problems. The only problem I have with that is that with each fix, at least 2 more problems arise, meaning you’d have to wait even longer to get things fixed.

Esplen.3940:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

In a perfect world, ANet would just use a standard top down approach on QA on identifying problems.

How much active time played has each profession?
In what type is the respective profession played how frequently?
What are the most commonly used traits, utility and weapons in the different game modes?
What are the least frequently used traits, utility and weapons in all game modes?

And than they should take the last question for the least played profession in its least played game mode and start fixing this. After that they can balance the more frequently used stuff.

Rinse repeat, welcome to the never ending cycle of balancing in an MMO.

This isn’t actually that standard, although it is very logical and ideal. This keeps everything fresh and “in the meta” because if it falls off, it gets put onto the priority fix-list.

Also, it feels like a lot of their… lack of making changes is due to them, Anet, not wanting to admit to making a mistake. This trait is underused? It’s the players fault, it’s fine number-wise! This utility is underused? It has it’s niche use, even if we (both Anet and playerbase) can’t find it, right?!

And that’s why we’ve gotten to the point where we get 6 month patches that “fix” these problems. The only problem I have with that is that with each fix, at least 2 more problems arise, meaning you’d have to wait even longer to get things fixed.

And then there are the problems that they just blatantly ignore. You know, the ones that have existed since launch? cough deathshroud, confusion, mesmer, downed state, ranger (to name a few).

Sometimes I wonder if ANet takes the stance of: the more the players complain about something and call for it to be fixed, the harder ANet digs in its heels and refuses that it could possibly actually be broken. We players have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the game (heavy sarcasm/eyeroll).

I didn’t want to talk about the Mesmer because I have too many complaints about things they’ve ignored since Beta…

But Anet has, like many other companies, gone through the phases of a bad balancing team.

They do their own thing, which makes sense to them and rolls along. The players don’t see the greater picture and whine. Loud minority gets to balance team, balance team changes something because of player feedback, kitten storm ensues (both between balance and causality) balance team no longer listens to players. Balance team stops talking to players. Balance team does their own thang and forgets about the greater picture.

^ Paraphrased and not entirely true.

Thx Kai – that’s the kind of stuff I was thinking.

My point in asking the question was to try to figure out what data is actually useful. Some of the forum posts are really well thought out (and even illustrated with videos), but I’m sure forum posters are just a subset of the player base and personal experience has too many variables.

Do you think there’s merit in trying to understand “success” or is just relative usage of a given profession, weapon, trait, etc good enough? My instinct is that every profession has a base learning curve. So a particular profession might be easier to succeed with starting out, but then might max out in effectiveness as you start going against players who are really good. So you might see a lot of usage of a particular profession, weapon, etc, but that might not reflect something being too powerful. If you’re trying to balance out gameplay at the highest levels, it seems like you need to get your data from the highest skilled players (without losing the fun of the game for casual players).

Anyway, just trying to brainstorm what data would work since it seems to be a very complex problem.

I always think of Ice Frog from DotA2. He basically follows Kai’s approach and DotA2 is in a pretty stable state unlike the other notable games in its’ genre.