Guild Wars 2

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This game was designed for the players to balance the game, not the developers.

Think about it.

The traits, weapons, utilities, elites, runes, sigils, accessories, and all the different stats all point to one thing.

Customization.

That customization sets the table with an all-you-can-eat buffet and all these guys in the Skills and Balance team do is shift how much some of the food gets eaten.

They are reacting to what you are doing because you are the ones balancing the game, not them.

They don’t want to limit your options. They don’t want to organize the game’s builds and choices.

They don’t want to impose on you. They can’t take responsibility for how the meta shakes out because it’s up to you, not them. They gave you options, and you decide how to use them.

You might get mad after reading this, but you’ll realize that this is the truth soon enough.

The Skills and Balance team are just maintenance guys. They do not aspire to balancing the game because it’s not their job. They just make sure the stuff works as intended and make changes to the game as the feedback over a long period of time points toward.

If you want balance, play a game that is designed for it. Guild Wars 2 isn’t. Starcraft 2 is. Mobas are. Trinity MMOs are.

Class Balance isn’t their problem. They only opened this forum to more easily get feedback for themselves. They have no aspirations to make PvP competitively balanced, WvW more inclusive for the less used classes, or any of that stuff.

All that jazz is your problem.

Nope. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game. When you put in optimal strategies, you can’t get kittened if people start using them.

Here is why this is true

If they didn’t want balance, they wouldn’t be nerfing AR this coming patch.

That’s just a reaction nerf, and only because the forum was flooded with QQ. They nerf things based on how much certain builds make getting feedback more annoying.

If they have to wade through “WAAAAHHHH” threads to get to the stuff they want, they write down the builds, go troll around with it with their cheat codes in their servers, maybe spend a meeting or two talking about it, then nerf it after seeing if people can figure out a counter themselves.

Dhuumfire was complained about from the start and it took them how long to nerf it? Automated Response has been despised for months and now they nerf it? Warrior, Decap Engi, etc. etc. etc.

This is because they have to see a trend over that time. They’re just maintaining their system, not optimizing it.

1. This doesn’t make any sense.
2. You already have a thread on the same topic.

This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time.

You’re implying that if the player’s deem something is overpowered it’s the player’s fault for continuing to use it as opposed to ANet’s fault for letting consistent problems go unaddressed for 6 months at a time?

You’re implying it’s the player’s fault if their class doesn’t have sufficient build diversity because the player’s should just accept horrible trait design and useless skills as a right of passage in an MMO?

For crying out loud dude…

You can get mad all you want, the truth is Anet isn’t responsible for what you do with the options available.

You are.

You created Decap Engi, Hambow Warrior, Spirit Ranger, S/D thief, S/P Thief, D/P Thief, Dhuumfire Necro, Bomb/Nade Engi, and all the other stuff that you don’t like.

I’m not saying it’s the player’s fault the options combine to be more dominant. That’s what winners do – they win. They build smarter, faster.

Anet doesn’t aspire to excellence in balance. They aspire to excellence in profit and pleasing the larger playerbase.

Balanced games punish stupid and slow. People don’t like being punished. They like Quaggans, Quaggan backpacks, shiny suits of pixelated armor, music, and storylines that are stuffed with cliches.

If you like balance, go play Starcraft 2. You’ll get slaughtered if you suck and even when you stop sucking, someone will roflstomp you because they scout better, have much higher APM and make better decisions.

Balance makes people feel inadequate. So Anet has delegated that to you so when things aren’t fair they can’t be totally blamed for it, and tweak things so you feel better about your inadequacy in building your character.

If you aren’t running apex predator builds you have no one to blame but yourself. It’s stupid not to.

Uh, no. I didn’t create an AoE knockback on a 15 second recharge with no cast time. I wouldn’t make that because that’s blatently OP. I wouldn’t create a trait that makes you immune to conditions at less than 25% health because that leaves no counterplay. I wouldn’t create a game where the intended design is for all classes to be able to support but in reality only a few can actually do it. I didn’t make Doom instant!

If you aren’t running apex predator builds you have no one to blame but yourself. It’s stupid not to.

Exactly. That’s bad game design. I didn’t make the game.

They want there to be some easy builds that are moderately effective. Unfortunately, they made them WAY too strong and now they’re dominating everything. Nerfing things is hard because people get kitten and their company policy is to be really slow and calculated with their nerfs. It’s not that they want all this bad design, it’s part the company policy and part…well bad design.

Exactly proving my point.

They’re just watching to see what you complain about other people using and then changing out some of the buffet table’s food for something else that might be as popular but hopefully a little less so.

They don’t want balance. You have to actually work for balance. How are three or four people going to balance a game this open-ended and customizable?

That was never the intention. They are delegating that to you by giving you so many options.

If you think it’s bad design I completely 2101239048% agree with you. It’s lazy. It’s sleazy corporate delegation. It doesn’t aspire to greatness or anything greater than what you find in a shopping mall.

Whole bunch of options. Almost all crap. A few of them will be excellent, but you have to really know the game to find them.

Anet cares about keeping the dollars rolling. In order to do this they need to keep as many people happy and playing the game as they can. If there is an obviously OP class setup it will kitten off the other 80% and bore the 20% playing the OP class.

An example is Archers in DAOC. At release archers were rediculously OP: one shot kills from stealth at max range. They were killing RvR participation and kittening off everyone else. The archers were one-shoting everything and it was boring. What the devs did was nerf Archers so hard they were unplayable for an entire year. It probably saved the game.

If you are playing an OP spec enjoy it while you can because you are heading for a nerf.

Relentless.7023:

You can get mad all you want, the truth is Anet isn’t responsible for what you do with the options available. You are.

(…)

If you aren’t running apex predator builds you have no one to blame but yourself. It’s stupid not to.

So, you are suggesting that we should just reroll if (because?) ANet fails to balance?

The cycle is never going to end.

There are so many options that it’s inevitable that every single patch cycle is going to have broken builds and specs.

All the Skills and balance and Community teams are doing is making sure you guys feel like you’re listened to and adding stuff that makes you go “OOOH SHINY”

I don’t know moba’s I do know Starcraft 2.

You reference Starcraft 2 as balanced when it is the same thing.

Blizzard makes the races, abilities, stages, units, buildings and cost and then give those to the players. The players then make the builds that win them games if those builds are consistently good then they become meta.

Usually a new strong meta build will win tournaments and skew the win ratio toward that particular race(see Stephano’s max roach) blizzard doesn’t hop in to nerf roaches they usually let players work through the meta to find a way to win despite forum QQ.

Blizzard didn’t tell people how to 4-gate rush, forge fast expand, 5 roach rush, muta-ling, the players figure that out but you cite that as a balanced game when it does the same exact thing as GW2 it gives you options customization. In SC2 you can counter on the fly not in gw2

Nobody is running the “David Kim” or “Dustin Browder” build in Starcraft 2 they are running stuff like "Idra"s 14 hatch ling-bane" people run player builds not dev builds.

I don’t understand how you can say Sc2 is balanced gw2 isn’t when your gripe with gw2 is customization when sc2 gives you way more options and customization.

quercus.9261:

Anet cares about keeping the dollars rolling. In order to do this they need to keep as many people happy and playing the game as they can. If there is an obviously OP class setup it will kitten off the other 80% and bore the 20% playing the OP class.

An example is Archers in DAOC. At release archers were rediculously OP: one shot kills from stealth at max range. They were killing RvR participation and kittening off everyone else. The archers were one-shoting everything and it was boring. What the devs did was nerf Archers so hard they were unplayable for an entire year. It probably saved the game.

If you are playing an OP spec enjoy it while you can because you are heading for a nerf.

Not in this game! They’ll always be an OP spec, it’s in the design. In PvE, balance really is of little concern. For WvW though, I honestly believe the Dev’s create a couple of Meta builds of either burst, stealth, or both, so roamers can troll other players. I also believe rage is apart of the games core design. When a Dev uses the words “tears” he loves to troll and creates the capacity to do so in game.

It takes a week, at most, to spot a Meta build emerging after a patch. An example would be Perplexity Runes. They nerfed confusion on Mesmer’s because it’s a very powerful condition. Yet, made perplexity runes to compound the issue.

Another example would be thieves as a profession. Which has been complained about endlessly on the forums since launch. Yet, every nerf they do to them is really only a give and take. The end results is still too strong of a profession, due to scaling, in WvW.

To me, combat shouldn’t last only a few seconds. There’s no skill involved in a fight lasting a couple of seconds. Thieves instagibbing macro, I’m looking at you! A fight lasting under 10 seconds, to me, is still a failure of design. Nerfing crit damage will do little to change this aspect of the game, as a couple of condition burst builds will simply take over. Which of course only a couple of professions have so there goes profession balancing out the window.

It’s imbalance and trolling by design. Because the only way to stay safe and subsequently happier, is by staying together. It’s like creating a school of fish by dropping a couple of sharks in the tank.

oZii.2864:

I don’t know moba’s I do know Starcraft 2.

You reference Starcraft 2 as balanced when it is the same thing.

Blizzard makes the races, abilities, stages, units, buildings and cost and then give those to the players. The players then make the builds that win them games if those builds are consistently good then they become meta.

Usually a new strong meta build will win tournaments and skew the win ratio toward that particular race(see Stephano’s max roach) blizzard doesn’t hop in to nerf roaches they usually let players work through the meta to find a way to win despite forum QQ.

Blizzard didn’t tell people how to 4-gate rush, forge fast expand, 5 roach rush, muta-ling, the players figure that out but you cite that as a balanced game when it does the same exact thing as GW2 it gives you options customization. In SC2 you can counter on the fly not in gw2

Nobody is running the “David Kim” or “Dustin Browder” build in Starcraft 2 they are running stuff like "Idra"s 14 hatch ling-bane" people run player builds not dev builds.

I don’t understand how you can say Sc2 is balanced gw2 isn’t when your gripe with gw2 is customization when sc2 gives you way more options and customization.

The difference being that those options, as you stated, can be adjusted on the fly and you can scout your opponent to figure out his build order.

GW2’s customization problem comes from the fact that no matter what traits/weapons they tweak, every single metagame is going to have some incredibly broken build that everyone has to build and build around.

The pieces aren’t independent of each other on the classes. You aren’t locked out of specific weapon sets when you take Defense traits on Warrior. If you couldn’t run Longbow unless you had a specific traitline, that would be WAY different.

So, because of this excessive freedom to build how you want to, each class’ best stuff gets combined, measured, and checked off by the playerbase through competitive play. The wheat is separated from the chaff, and what’s left are monstrosities like Hambow, Spirit Ranger, Dumbfire Necro and S/D Thief (in their heyday), etc.

That’s like being given 2k minerals and 1k vespene at the start of your SC2 match because you’re Terran. How stupid would that be? Just as stupid as there being no build limitations in this game.

You brought up an excellent point about balance in that game too. SC2 is largely self-balancing. If people are bringing a bunch of roaches every match, then you’ve got to build more detection with air and/or armor penetrating units.

In GW2 that isn’t possible since classes are locked at the start of the match, and even more impossible because roles are determined by the players not the developers.

SC2 Units have a specific purpose. GW2 classes have a range of potential purposes that is too wide and too easy to merge into multiple roles. That eliminates the diversity that would make people more encouraged to main a class in PvP, and makes stale metas that people get tired of after a couple weeks, and last for months while Anet tries to figure out who’s QQ is legit and who’s isn’t.

They built the game to be way too customizable, so much so that the competition becomes the total opposite of the idea of playing the class you want. If they want people to take PvP seriously, they need to limit the scope of each class enough to prevent the cycle of OP BS.

In GW1, i’d say it’s mostly true that the players balanced the game, because that game in particular had the depth that there was always a build X that could be crafted specifically to counter build Y.

I don’t think this is the case in GW2, the same level of depth isn’t there. Course, the other problem with GW2 is that the intra-class balance is so bad – entire trait lines & utilities continue to be useless 18 months post-release.

Relentless.7023:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This game was designed for the players to balance the game, not the developers.

Think about it.

The traits, weapons, utilities, elites, runes, sigils, accessories, and all the different stats all point to one thing.

Customization.

That customization sets the table with an all-you-can-eat buffet and all these guys in the Skills and Balance team do is shift how much some of the food gets eaten.

They are reacting to what you are doing because you are the ones balancing the game, not them.

They don’t want to limit your options. They don’t want to organize the game’s builds and choices.

They don’t want to impose on you. They can’t take responsibility for how the meta shakes out because it’s up to you, not them. They gave you options, and you decide how to use them.

You might get mad after reading this, but you’ll realize that this is the truth soon enough.

The Skills and Balance team are just maintenance guys. They do not aspire to balancing the game because it’s not their job. They just make sure the stuff works as intended and make changes to the game as the feedback over a long period of time points toward.

If you want balance, play a game that is designed for it. Guild Wars 2 isn’t. Starcraft 2 is. Mobas are. Trinity MMOs are.

Class Balance isn’t their problem. They only opened this forum to more easily get feedback for themselves. They have no aspirations to make PvP competitively balanced, WvW more inclusive for the less used classes, or any of that stuff.

All that jazz is your problem.

I think you’re out of line saying they don’t care about balancing the game. They have to care because it’s their job to keep the game alive, and balance is part of healthy gameplay which helps the game and helps give them a job. You sound really ignorant.