Guild Wars 2

Mixchimmer.7230:

I know that this is about a month old, and that this post has already gotten Dev attention — but I feel the need to chime in anyways. I had to even re-set my password to say this.

I don’t play Guild Wars 2 anymore, and it’s for every single reason that is highlighted in the OP

I also don’t plan on playing regularly again until these things are addressed.

I log on and peruse the forums every now and then because I want guild wars to be what I thought it would be SO BADLY. I have great memories from this game and I remember the feeling of grandeur it filled me with because of all of the possibilities. Instead, I was left frustrated and disappointed for the reasons highlighted in the OP. The feedback was so on point without being condescending or insulting — it spoke directly of the facts, and that’s why I was drawn in.

Thanks a lot for being a voice of the community of sorts MonMalthias. At least I know you were speaking for me when you made this post.

Here’s to hoping it is taken very seriously by the management (and then subsequently bleeds down to the devs). If it’s not, I will likely never play again, and I fear other players may start to follow suit.

Nice post!

Getting to that point myself, so hopefully we see some major improvements soon.

Swagger.1459:

Mixchimmer.7230:

I know that this is about a month old, and that this post has already gotten Dev attention — but I feel the need to chime in anyways. I had to even re-set my password to say this.

I don’t play Guild Wars 2 anymore, and it’s for every single reason that is highlighted in the OP

I also don’t plan on playing regularly again until these things are addressed.

I log on and peruse the forums every now and then because I want guild wars to be what I thought it would be SO BADLY. I have great memories from this game and I remember the feeling of grandeur it filled me with because of all of the possibilities. Instead, I was left frustrated and disappointed for the reasons highlighted in the OP. The feedback was so on point without being condescending or insulting — it spoke directly of the facts, and that’s why I was drawn in.

Thanks a lot for being a voice of the community of sorts MonMalthias. At least I know you were speaking for me when you made this post.

Here’s to hoping it is taken very seriously by the management (and then subsequently bleeds down to the devs). If it’s not, I will likely never play again, and I fear other players may start to follow suit.

Nice post!

Getting to that point myself, so hopefully we see some major improvements soon.

I am not sure about the “hopefully we get improvements soon” point.
In my mind, they have taken some steps backward with setting all worldbosses on a somewhat fixed timer and by lowering the normal event reward. They also have to work on the wardrobe and the megaservers. The outfits are messed and the roleplayers are also legitimately complaining about the megaservers.
As much as I hope for good changes, as little faith I have in ANet.

Wow what an epic OP. Couldn’t have said it better. A lot of potential in gw2 development is squandered on garbage

I really do think that it’s important to keep this thread in mind until we see some improvements.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

I really do think that it’s important to keep this thread in mind until we see some improvements.

I agree… but it’s not so much a matter of keeping the topic visible as it is keeping the discussion going. I think in the past if people are bumping posts for the sake of only visibility — they usually get shut down.

I know Mon mainly talked about balance in the OP, but he did briefly mention PvE and this is one of the areas that I think needs the most improvement.

Anet releases a whole bunch of really great and intriguing content; but the combat in PvE is so utterly one dimensional and boring to me. I’m not going to play through the intriguing content unless it’s fun to do so. Even the combat mechanics are fun — it’s just the complete lack of viable builds aside from DPS. Sure you can run support or control — but if you do that you’re basically wasting everyone’s time. This, paired with the fact that weapons only have one set of strict skills makes every PvE encounter sort of feel just like you’re beating your head against a brick wall.

For me to return to the game.I would love to see 3-4 options for each 1-5 slot of a weapon (or 4-5 on offhands, 1-3 on mainhands), or some other similar alternative that would allow more customization of your characters combat experience. This along with the viability of support and control builds in PvE would make me actually really really want to return to playing GW2.

This is why I hope they see the feedback — because I desperately WANT to like GW2 again.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that 70% of skills and traits and runes feel completely useless (completely) in PvE. Traits that do very minor passive things are just boring.

Just thought I’d add my voice to this.

I completely agree.
I’ve been playing since launch and after a few months of playing I started to ask myself “what is ArenaNet doing?” as more and more bugs/exploits and glaring balance issues started to pop up with many of these issues not being acknowledged or fixed/fixed properly.

I still ask myself the same question to this day.

Just as an example. Quite awhile ago a patch came out that allowed engineer kits to scale with legendary/ascended weapons (around 5% damage increase) instead of staying at exotic power and this was hotfixed within a day or two which brought kits back down to exotic levels, but then I look over at the fiery greatswords #4 skill fiery rush with it’s extreme exploitability (which has been happening for months with no fix) and wonder “what is ArenaNet doing?”
Or how about back when we could climb over the caves in CM Explorable mode? How long did it take to just add a giant invisible wall around the mountain?

It just seems like they’re in favour of adding new temporary content that we’ll never see again over fixing what they already have and is there to stay.

@Ronin
I’ve see the patching ANet does, before. I’ve been there myself, tbh. It’s usually indicative of a team which is working on a program they never wrote themselves. Even after 2+ years the sheer lack of familiarity with the engine causes issues as dozens of bugs spring up every time you squash one, and you cannot ask the original programmer what the intend behind some piece of code was.

If I had to guess, the feature patch was internally a rewrite of many components. If that’s true, we might see better patching in the future. At least I hope we’ll do.

I feel like Anet gave up on us, a response just to know they are taking feedback into consideration would be wonderful.

Hmmm. I do not think you should get to much credit for this post, the forums are FULL with posts like this. do not get me wrong, it only proves that you are 100000% right, and i am perfectly agreeing with you. But you do get credit for making such grand effort to put it in decent form! +1

First of all i made 20+ topics about excellent solutions, ideas, that should be implemented (and are basically minor adjustments), that could improve the game thousand folds, but the community is terrible on this topic.
A lot of players are actually against of ANY improvements to the game. Or in fact any CONTENT ! (i do not get this…)
Guild halls, more legendary player housing, GvG, more weapons, skills, more viable combat roles besides general “dodge and damage”.
The combat is 100% reliant on dodge, bosses 1 shot you, no point of heals and support. Downed state killing pvp…i could go on…and you could argue with me…but the big % of player who already left and rarely come back to check on game state (since they are still HOPING).

And its true….there are thousands of posts and community communications to Anet, and we get 0 feedback. I am not even sure devs. even care about forums…i am totally not sure where they are getting info about community feedback, but they are making videos and replies that feel like they have 0 clue about what we are thinking.

The only 1 thing the community has generally in mind (and its undeniable, just look at general chat ask anyone generally and 8 of 10 will have this opinion) : Will they announce expansion and content now that they released in China?

Gw1 was my favorite game i think after Warcraft 2, but it was half kittenty before Factions came. After expansion it became awesome, and got even more amazing after each expansion. So my opinion is : If they do not give us decent content in a form of expansion or something, this game is done for, for the players that are here to play, and not to fanboy the game.

Nekroseth.5186:

A lot of players are actually against of ANY improvements to the game. Or in fact any CONTENT ! (i do not get this…)
Guild halls, more legendary player housing, GvG, more weapons, skills, more viable combat roles besides general “dodge and damage”.
The combat is 100% reliant on dodge, bosses 1 shot you, no point of heals and support. Downed state killing pvp…i could go on…and you could argue with me…but the big % of player who already left and rarely come back to check on game state (since they are still HOPING).

1 To be honest I’m against any form of marginal content until the core issues this game has are fixed, class balance beeing completely kitten. I’d rather see classes beeing brought to an equal level than see another year of #1spam content.

2 Not just PvP. Downed state allows even “bad” players to run full zerk and do reasonably well. I can’t recall the person who said that, but basically this game has no dedicated healers until one player gets downed and then suddenly everyone becomes a great healer. Up until a point where you can acutally plan to get dowened in order to “heal yourself back up” or get rid of some conditions. Instead of bringing down zerker gear, they should remove the whole concept of beeing dead, but not dead.

I just think the core of this problem is the time frame between each patch. They give us a bunch of new toys for <insert winter holiday here>, many of which we didn’t ask for so we fake a smile and say," Gee, thanks! ~.~" and then they go out of town for months on end.

Even with this season going on, I can understand to not continue the next segment of LS (needs to deliver, have an impact, not be all about temp content, etc) but that doesn’t mean pvp is all gravy. I mean pvp should have the most attention, it IS end game. That’s not to say when you hit 80 go do some kitten pvp, but aside from getting skins and ascended there is no more progression except pvp or wvw rank.

Pvp balance imho should have at the very least 1 patch every month. It’s only wac-a-mole if you smite a build and throw X^X power on a skill, giving little attention every month to bring things in line and tone other things down is what is needed. Take s/d thief atm, its pretty broken in the right hands with little risk but does that mean thief is op? No. Look at the runes/sigils that are used, look at what the ferocity change did to critical damage trait lines, kudos to dedicating a patch to runes and sigils as it certainly opened many doors but it also closed a large number and did little to add to diversity. Look at constant complaints against traits/skills that are down right useless or backfire (last refuge, self-regulating defenses, etc).

Its time the pvp balance team went into overdrive and brought in some more bodies to fix or rework the hundreds of trait/weapon/armor/rune/sigil/utility/healing/elite skills that are far from rewarding. Its time to listen to the sane people on the forums, and not give in to the whiners who don’t back their statements up with any experience. It’s time to quit ignoring the elephant in the room. Are you guys up to it or is it safe to move to another game? I’d like to stay if that’s ok but I need something enjoyable and pvp right now is not enjoyable, pve is even less exciting.

I have not heard anything from Anet since the feature patch, which was about a month ago! Where are they?!

Grimreaper.5370:

I have not heard anything from Anet since the feature patch, which was about a month ago! Where are they?!

They don’t post much, it seems to be a company policy for certain groups to not post. If I were them I would have shipped the patch and probably taken a little break then just gotten right back in to continuing on.

Hopefully, putting together a blog to discuss their plans for class balance. Or on vacation, tis the (wvw) season.

Even if nothing big is planned for another month, it would be nice to know what they were up to.

Grimreaper.5370:

Even if nothing big is planned for another month, it would be nice to know what they were up to.

The second they post anything all the forums/Reddit blows up with:
OMG NEW CONTENT TOMORROW
WHEN IS THE NEW CONTENT
THEY PROMISED NEW CONTENT WHY ISN’T IT OUT YET
OMFG ANET SO LAZY HAVEN’T PATCHED STILL, BEEN DAYS SINCE THEY SAID THEY WERE WORKING ON IT
BLAH BLAH BLAH

There really isn’t any reason for them to announce it until they are ready to go.

So let reddit go crazy, anet has done it before with a blog discussing future plans. They didn’t give dates, they just discussed what would be worked on and completed by a time frame (“rest of the year”). If reddit wants to interoperate that as “tomorrow” let them, at least anet can just link the fools what their actual words were and not feel guilty if people cry because they have to wait a week or month for those features to be shipped out.

The point is communication, something they aren’t all that good at it seems. Too much is done behind closed doors where we don’t know what’s being worked on or any small details on it. Don’t need a blue print, just something like ," hey, we will be dedicating another patch to profession balance this summer, etc etc".

Another few words, i forgot to say :

1, This game might be Buy to Play, but it still needs players to function. Dont be so quick to send of other players, because you dont want to hear “moaning”.
-Side note : Getting players back is a lot harder then getting new ones, or avoiding the loss of players.

2, A lot of my players in my community (online and offline to) are considering the game to be still in like beta state. And i realized, it kind of does feel like it.

You might say, but its complete and functioning….yeah it is but it is like this :
You promise a caste, have materials for a citadel, but run out of money so you start making a mansion, but run out of time to, so end up with a house, that is fully functional, but in no way near a citadel or castle -_-

Yes, but it’s still pretty good, for a MMORPG.
Have to see things in comparison. The only more-polished MMO I can think of would be WoW, and hell knows they got polish galore. But that’s ~all WoW has at this point, so fair enough.

If you want to see how disappointment looks in MMORPG-form, look at TESO. :P

Carighan.6758:

Yes, but it’s still pretty good, for a MMORPG.
Have to see things in comparison. The only more-polished MMO I can think of would be WoW, and hell knows they got polish galore. But that’s ~all WoW has at this point, so fair enough.

If you want to see how disappointment looks in MMORPG-form, look at TESO. :P

But in a MMORPG, where you can challange other players, balance is a crutial part. And GW2 never left the beta balancewise.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

But in a MMORPG, where you can challange other players, balance is a crutial part. And GW2 never left the beta balancewise.

What MMORPG has good balance? WoW? Hell no. GW1? It was a clusterkitten of FotM builds that would rise up then get nerfed, and then a new FotM would be found and the cycle would continue.

It doesn’t excuse ANet from their balance failures, but its not like there is a precedence for expecting balance in an MMORPG.

The balance is actually pretty good. But it depends on your expectations. Every class can easily kill every other class. Thing is, not that many of your fights unless artificially staged are actually influenced by player skill. Much of what decides whether you live or die is based on initiative, status, context and momentum.

Considering just how often the game-state dictates your best approach (meaning, when to not give combat), the class balance matters a lot less than it often sounds on these forums. And in the context of that, balance is … quite ok.

Their big problem is iteration-speed, not specific balance. The changes themselves are more then acceptable, if they happened every 2 weeks, like living story changes. And IMO, that’s what needs to happen: Every 2 weeks, with the LS update, push out all current balance iterations. MMOs never leave a beta-ish state, so why not capitalize on it and go full out test-early-test-often-fail-fast on balance changes. More iterations, more input, more data, more iterations.

Carighan.6758:

Their big problem is iteration-speed, not specific balance. The changes themselves are more then acceptable, if they happened every 2 weeks, like living story changes. And IMO, that’s what needs to happen: Every 2 weeks, with the LS update, push out all current balance iterations. MMOs never leave a beta-ish state, so why not capitalize on it and go full out test-early-test-often-fail-fast on balance changes. More iterations, more input, more data, more iterations.

While I would say you are right about the iteration speed, 2 weeks is imply too often. It’s not feasible from a work point of view. It’s not like you are programming a software where you know more or less what the software looks like in two weeks and you can already program the next part of changes/features on top of that. Balance simply does not work like this.

You have to work this process:
#Assess current balance situation (takes a week for the team)
#Identify possible changes (Nerf/Buff/Shift in viability) (takes again a few days)
#Program the changes (might take an hour or a week, depending on amount and unintended bugs)
#Test the changes (Can be done parallel to implementation to a degree; Go back tostep no. 2; Iteration loop can take from one day to 12 months <- requires a clear limit)
#Let the playerbase settle and play + hotfixes (2-4weeks <- This highly subjective)
#Begin again

All in all you might be able to push it down to 4 weeks, but 6-10 weeks might be better to identify problems and test. I guess ANET just has some data that supports the idea that halfyear iterations are best bang for the buck with a relative stable meta and no extreme OP builds.

Carighan.6758:

Thing is, not that many of your fights unless artificially staged are actually influenced by player skill. Much of what decides whether you live or die is based on initiative, status, context and momentum.

As much as the outcome of a fight is influenced by more than player skill, I think people intensely underestimate how much skill is actually involved in this game. It’s ultra easy to excuse failure on any number of game mechanics/balance issues, especially in an MMO, but the range of player ability I’ve seen roaming around in personal fights is incredibly wide. I’ll have one really close fight against one PU Mesmer, then I’ll destroy another who is much easier to read. Knowing what your opponent is capable of, knowing what tools you have to deal with it, and knowing how and when to implement those tools in the context of your playstyle is paramount to coming out on top.

Sure, if a PU Mesmer catches me with my camp-soloing utilities swapped in, I’m going to have a much rougher time. I just think too many people feel they are simply sitting on a skill plateau with the rest of the GW2 players and default to blaming the game instead of improving themselves.

But I digress. I would enjoy them releasing little balance updates every two weeks to tweak things here and there. They’d have to shift their development paradigm most likely, but I think it would be a healthy shift.

I’d also like to see them totally ax certain runes, but that’s probably less likely.

Every month or two (depending on patch size) is a pretty respectable balance patch cycle, the issue is that bug fixes, additions, simple changes, basically anything that needs to be changed is stuck to this very rigid cycle. They just (obviously) don’t have enough people working on these things at once. Their QA is frankly awful, their response to player-found bugs is amazingly slow and unresponsive. There have been very obvious bugs that were reported multiple times, had multiple threads opened, and still went on for up to 4 months or, rarely, even longer (transformations are STILL bugged and have been since launch and AI are two examples). That is simply unacceptable, and with the way things are they could use to have a devoted bug team.

A very critical analysis, yet it does describe my current experience as a customer player. Overall in spirit I do think of Arenanet as friends I have not officially met in person and wish them every success.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

But in a MMORPG, where you can challange other players, balance is a crutial part. And GW2 never left the beta balancewise.

This is assuming of coarse, that we take your word or the words of the very very vocal minority, that there are any real balance concerns.

I just read a thread on the general forums, from a guy who is new to the game. Upon trying to pick a profession to start, he was baffled. As he pointed out, every professional sub-forum was bogged down with thread after thread that suggested the profession that was the subject of each thread needed this or that. To new players each professional sub-forum makes it appear every profession is under powered.

My experience after having leveled all professions to 80, is that for the most part, all of the profession are fairly solid. With very few exceptions of limited aspects of a profession here or their having minor issues.

All clear signs that the game as a whole is in a solid place, with the problem being a very select few who perceive a problem. As well, those select few have a habit of attacking those who do not agree, or spamming post after post of very anecdotal situations.

Balance is subjective anyway. Levels of perception vary based on skill level as well. I can honestly say that I have played with some of the most adamant suggesters of imbalance, some of them on this thread. My experience with them often displayed very poor active discussions in their practices in game play. Yet they come to the forums and blame balance or the game.

I just found this post today, but remember many posts similar to this a year ago. There is a lack of transparency, an unwillingness for discussion and feedback, lack of player inclusion in decision making, and a complete and utter failure to respond to lackluster fixes or implementations.

This has been true of Anet since the beginning of GW1. The differences there were quite large though – mainly in terms of skills and builds. Each profession used to have hundreds of skill choices, not a couple dozen. Anet could afford to blast around like a bull in a china shop, because there were enough fall back skills to cover up the balance ineptitude.

But they carried the same ideas and proccesses forward into GW2, with a system that can’t handle the same ineptitude and absorb the failed output of the “fixes.”

The only thing that can fix this issue is implementing a public test realm, where people can actively try to break things before they are introduced live. That way polish is there from the beginning, and doesn’t need to be added in months later when the 4 people that do balance and bug fixes can find time to take off from the living story constant updates.

Anet needs to adapt forward-looking practices and ideologies that modern gamers have come to expect, and rightly so. I am not saying that we should get everything that the forum goers demand, but that Anet not be so rigid in what they give us that they can’t take the time to find out whether or not it is beneficial to the game from the player’s standpoint. After all, we pay their paychecks, and if they ignore us long enough, even that stupid little fuzzy hat on the TP isn’t going to make ends meet anymore.

In all due sincerity.

I completely and utterly disagree with the opinion of 90% of the players that post in this topic.
In fact. I believe that most of the playerbase disagrees with most opinions that cross around here. But I won’t bother myself with numbers I don’t have.

As far as PvE goes, we have a lot of people complaining about how easy and uninteresting the content in this game is.
I would like to point out that for the “normal player” (read: casual, plays 2 hours a day, may or not have ever played a MMo before GW2) there are dungeons and PvE content that are hard or inaccessible.

Some people say that the old “punchbag mobs” could be as much creative and cool as some of the new mobs goes (this is new, players of game X using another mob of game X as example, never saw that before).

Creative? Cool ?
Why don’t you sit on a low lvl map, close to one of these events (like the Toxic Alliance flowers and watch how many players actually try to finish it.
Some of these events stay up for hours without completion meanwhile others event around are completely 6~10 times in a row, until some randon players decides to save the poor caged engies who aren’t going to die anyway. For drama’s sake.

I am sadly announcing that, IMO, the “vision” that you guys have is simply annoying. It doesn’t matter how much I like a challenge, I don’t want every mob on GW2 enter Dark Souls mode because they “could be more creative”.

In sad if not hilarius, to watch a new player on any guild asking for help to kill a boss, and the first question he receives is:
- “if the champion is from events or a normal map champ”.
- “Oh wait, this is a <insert living world event here> champ, those take too long to kill, kill boss Y that it’s easier and give the same exp”.

I am totally for ANET adding more game modes and dungeons for “hard core PvE players”. But doesn’t make the game a frustrating experience for everyone else because you think that the current farmable content is boring.
Believe me when I say that some people take grind as a *relaxing and mindless * experience. And having to think and use strategy to kill every mob/champ is far from that.

Now on class/PvP balance. Really..
Just…
Really

I’ve being playing MMos for exactly 13 years now. That’s not much, yes.
But I am yet to see a game community that doesn’t spend all day complaining about balance on foruns.
The awesome, cool, unicorn world of “Balance” that you guys complain on this section:
Never saw. I don’t see. Probably never will.

The reason balance is so desired is because this game is amazing, we all want it to succeed. But when you play the same profession every day, you’ve spent hundred or thousands of hours on it over almost two years, you know every single weak trait, every single weak skill, every single thing about your class that isn’t quite where it should be.

So do you go on the forums and kitten with ANet about how awesome the game is? No, you have to talk about the future of the game, which assumes the game isn’t perfect as is.

Bhawb.7408:

The reason balance is so desired is because this game is amazing, we all want it to succeed. But when you play the same profession every day, you’ve spent hundred or thousands of hours on it over almost two years, you know every single weak trait, every single weak skill, every single thing about your class that isn’t quite where it should be.

So do you go on the forums and kitten with ANet about how awesome the game is? No, you have to talk about the future of the game, which assumes the game isn’t perfect as is.

An occasional weak trait or weak skill does not make a professions out of balance. Nor does it by any means justify most of what is said in this thread. Not to mention, most of the post/threads demanding X changes to X profession, use extremely subjective ideas of what makes a skill under or over powered. No one is suggesting the game is perfect, but some many of the complaints come in the form of demands and are often viewed as unreasonable to many others.

Bhawb.7408:

The reason balance is so desired is because this game is amazing, we all want it to succeed. But when you play the same profession every day, you’ve spent hundred or thousands of hours on it over almost two years, you know every single weak trait, every single weak skill, every single thing about your class that isn’t quite where it should be.

So do you go on the forums and kitten with ANet about how awesome the game is? No, you have to talk about the future of the game, which assumes the game isn’t perfect as is.

I agree with that.

In fact, I do believe that the players that actively post on forums are the few selected group of players that actually care enough for the game. Gratz for all of us.

But we are just a minor part of the community. Voices and opinions here are the voice of the minority. That will never change.
Not saying it isn’t important. I just pointing out that not everything said here as “a problem” may actually be a problem in the eyes of Anet or the majority of the community.

In fact, that makes me remember of the queen arena event.
Personally I loved that arena. We had tons of topics discussing real strategy and build to beat one single boss! On Guild Wars 2?! Who could ever imagine that!

We also had 1000 topics complaining about how hard said event was. That’s reality.

In my experience, you have way more threads and post that demand or expect changes to their preferred profession. In many cases, they could care less if they are balanced request or not, nor do they care, in many cases, if they are even reasonable.

Similar to how we had threads for months and months demanding they change fights such as Tequatl, to be much more difficult. Although thousands of players kill Tequatl daily, you see a new thread almost daily, complaining how it is entirely too difficult and should be reverted.

*wonders where all the money goes because it certainly isn’t being reinvested here.

Swagger.1459:

*wonders where all the money goes because it certainly isn’t being reinvested here.

Which is a good thing. Last I want them to do is listen to this forum community. Balance is wonky enough as it is, if they start listening to the ideas on these forums it’s going to get absolutely terrible.

SoulSin.5682:

But we are just a minor part of the community. Voices and opinions here are the voice of the minority. That will never change.
Not saying it isn’t important. I just pointing out that not everything said here as “a problem” may actually be a problem in the eyes of Anet or the majority of the community.

That’s true. For all anyone of us might think that conditions need help, we don’t actually know what the server-stats say. Maybe 75% of all damage in PvE is dealt by conditions. Maybe condition-specs constitute 40% of players in explorables.
Maybe Warriors aren’t winning 99% of their fights, and less than 110% are using hammers.

We don’t know. We’re projecting from a vocal – and angry, and biased – minority onto the playerbase at large. But we have to assume they’re rather happy with the status quo, because the anger is what drives people to the forums.

Carighan.6758:

Swagger.1459:

*wonders where all the money goes because it certainly isn’t being reinvested here.

Which is a good thing. Last I want them to do is listen to this forum community. Balance is wonky enough as it is, if they start listening to the ideas on these forums it’s going to get absolutely terrible.

Listening to ideas and acting on them are two entirely different things.

They are simply taking far to long to do anything. You don’t get balance by throwing some new toys in and seeing how it plays out for the next few months. Montioring is good only if something is at risk of spinning out of control. When you see nothing but strength runes for power builds, repetititive builds in tournaments and in general matches, then work on fixing it. They say they don’t want a wac-a-mole approach but they seem to of taken that stance to the absolute extreme and wait months before trying anything. Balance isn’t something you can just let soak in over time, balance patches need to drastically increase their frequency if anything is to ever get done.

I just picked up the game again a few days ago. Mon has so clearly put the heart of what’s keeping me from being able to stick with it that it’s really striking. The production values are so high and so many choices on changing basic fundamentals of how MMOs work that I really want to love Guild Wars 2, but these balance issues are always eating at the back of my mind when I try to play. The proffesion I’ve been most interested in playing since pre-launch has sat at or next to the bottom of the list in terms of usefulness since GW2 came out. It drives me absolutely crazy that so little has been to change this. In addition to said list not shifting much if at all, again, since release. At least that’s how it seems to me. Admittedly I don’t follow the game very closely when I’m not actively playing it.

I can’t see this thread and not add my two cents even if it’s another just piece of hay on the bale of community opinion. I wanted to voice my discontent with the way balancing has been handled thus far anyway. It’s a real shame something so simple is keeping GW2 from really shining.

this needs another bump after the ready up

it’s almost 4 moths since this post and already more time since the first player told similar stuff in the forums, we only can hope that within the 2nd season they so something about this.
But when i see that posts like this have only minor feedback while the “X is OP PLZ nerf” threads are huge i can only assume that the majority of the community isn’t even interessed in stuff like this and therefore anet isn’t even listing….

Balance has always been one of those onerous issues. You tweak one class to stop over performing against another and now unexpectedly it is completely vulnerable to a completely different class.

Which is why I hate class-based systems. They’ve been flawed since their inception. If friggin wow hasn’t gotten it right in 10 years…and older mmo’s have outright died…while games like Eve, UO, Elder Scrolls, ect live on is testament to this. Which is the reason every hard core, crowd funded, enthusiast mmo is skill based. Too late now…

On the subject of patch cadence, here’s the current PTR patch notes of Wildstar . And no, this isn’t the only patch. Not at all. They also added a content update in the meantime.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Wildstar is a pretty meh and rather unfinished game. But that’s the thing:
If WildStar can have proper-sized patches with some balance changes and a lot of actual bug fixes every time, and have those fast, how come you can not, ArenaNet? You are – last I know – a 350 people dev time, gargantuan from a MMO-maker’s perspective.

And yet from our perspective, you patch slower than the commonly-cited slow juggernaut of the industry, Blizzard. You wait weeks to fix exploits or need 3-4 attempts to do, you only did one proper balance patch since LS1 and it felt tiny for how long it took to get it (raid patches in WoW do more balance-changes!), you rarely if ever do larger bug-fix patches frequently. There’s so many bugs left in this game affecting class balance that those balance patches I lament the lack of wouldn’t even make any sense.

So… where are all those patches?
Where is that giant dev team? What are they doing? Where’s the community interaction?

On that subject, again, look at WildStar: They posted a large article about a bug they fixed. One bug. It’s not a rare thing either, they have very frequent and very tight community interaction, on their forums, on reddit, they talk to people and give updates what they’re doing, when.
And keep in mind, WS is meh, IMO. But again, if they can do it, what’s stopping you with your larger team and larger budget (I suspect, or you wouldn’t have such a large team)?

Carighan.6758:

So… where are all those patches?
Where is that giant dev team? What are they doing? Where’s the community interaction?

Think they are doodling for the LSS2. China launch is already out, wvw S2 has been over for sometime now, the last “balance” patch was almost 3 months ago and although opened some doors also closed several, it took ~ 3 months to address strength runes (good change I’ll admit just took forever). I think they need to relocate their resources to more prevalent matters like balance and build diversity. I play 6/8 professions and I can make a list of traits and utility/healing skills that are down right pointless, don’t even get me started on rune sets.

Even if their changes may be questionable, they should occur often. You don’t achieve balance by throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks 6 months later. There are bugs, there are spec’s that don’t work, there are spec’s that work too good. Make small but frequent changes and it isn’t wac-a-mole, its balancing. I believe they do look at the community feed back, they just don’t do anything with it.

What surprises me is that pure balance changes (as in, fiddling with numbers instead of mechanics) don’t require a lot of manpower at all. They’re require ~2-3 people to design the change and one to implement it, the other 1-2 can then play around with the change a bit to see whether it does what they wanted while the 1 already does the next change.

There’s very little QC involved (assuming you make 0 design-related changes), and no text to update which isn’t just a number pulled from the skill.

Those changes should really happen very, very often.

Carighan.6758:

On the subject of patch cadence, here’s the current PTR patch notes of Wildstar . And no, this isn’t the only patch. Not at all. They also added a content update in the meantime.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Wildstar is a pretty meh and rather unfinished game. But that’s the thing:
If WildStar can have proper-sized patches with some balance changes and a lot of actual bug fixes every time, and have those fast, how come you can not, ArenaNet? You are – last I know – a 350 people dev time, gargantuan from a MMO-maker’s perspective.

And yet from our perspective, you patch slower than the commonly-cited slow juggernaut of the industry, Blizzard. You wait weeks to fix exploits or need 3-4 attempts to do, you only did one proper balance patch since LS1 and it felt tiny for how long it took to get it (raid patches in WoW do more balance-changes!), you rarely if ever do larger bug-fix patches frequently. There’s so many bugs left in this game affecting class balance that those balance patches I lament the lack of wouldn’t even make any sense.

So… where are all those patches?
Where is that giant dev team? What are they doing? Where’s the community interaction?

On that subject, again, look at WildStar: They posted a large article about a bug they fixed. One bug. It’s not a rare thing either, they have very frequent and very tight community interaction, on their forums, on reddit, they talk to people and give updates what they’re doing, when.
And keep in mind, WS is meh, IMO. But again, if they can do it, what’s stopping you with your larger team and larger budget (I suspect, or you wouldn’t have such a large team)?

Anet has NO SUB. Thats the key difference with it and Wildstar

Anet HAS to focus their efforts on LS + gemstore junk because those two things bring in money to anet.

Wildstar has a sub fee so their devs don’t have to focus on lame stuff like cash shop items and a cheesy story. Wildstar devs have shown committment to balance, bug fixes and endgame content. The complete opposite of anet. Take a look at the wildstar reddit and see the vast amount of dev responses. Almost every day or at the very least every other day, there are new dev posts on the reddit.

SkiTz.4590:

Wildstar has a sub fee so their devs don’t have to focus on lame stuff like cash shop items and a cheesy story. Wildstar devs have shown committment to balance, bug fixes and endgame content. The complete opposite of anet. Take a look at the wildstar reddit and see the vast amount of dev responses. Almost every day or at the very least every other day, there are new dev posts on the reddit.

I already covered that Wildstar was a pretty meh game overall.

But you got a point in the sub fee. And in theory, you’re right, only that’s not really how dev teams work. The content team of ANet has to create stuff which makes money, yes. Not exclusively, but largely so. But that’s the content team only.
This is comparable to the team at Wildstar that cranks out the content patches, they got one already.

The core development team however is independent of that. They just work on the game. They’re an added cost in either business model, they fix bugs, do balance, do new core additions, rework classes, change game systems as new content demands it, etc.

Oddly due to the Sub vs Non Sub modles anet is in a bit of a strange place.

Option 1. Anet does not focus on Piece meal “Content” and Gem Shop Skins But Focuses on Gw2’s Bugs – Anet loses out on current Player Pocket Change to some extent but may retain a higher player base for a longer time.

Option 2. Anet Focuses on in game Horizontal Progression and Expanding Core mechanics and fleshing out what is present to its fullest extent. – No Cash influx on Gem Shop items, potential loss of players seeking more story and end game, retains players and potentially gains more players as the good word spreads who may then spend some money on the game/gems.

Option 3. Anet only focuses on LS and filler content with Gem based Horizontal Progression and Balances the rest of the “Loot game” around Gem prices/ Gold Conversion – Anet loses players seeking more substantial content, anet loses Hard core players, Anet does not earn many new sales of the game due to potential word of mouth, anet retains casual audiences and influxes of money every 2 weeks.

While i’m positive a more happy medium can be located.. i was more fond of LS when it was a Monthly Release that allowed for other Patches and Work to be done to the game… This medium wont be found until some people who sit behind a big round desk with charts discover it is better for their wallets and share holders that Anet spend more effort on regaining and Retaining a player base with a Solid and Healthy Game vs just milking the fading Player Base with Gems and Carrots on Sticks.