Guild Wars 2

I’ve played this game since Beta and watched the sPvP in this game go all over the place in terms of balance.

After watching the most recent PvP balance preview and reading the feedback left by many of the high level players, it appears the sPvP game ArenaNet is making is not the ones these players want.

So, I’d like to offer a suggestion: Allow the player base to adjust many of the profession parameters via their own custom arenas. Put the knobs into custom arenas to adjust spell coefficients, proc durations, enable/disable Utilities or Traits, etc.

That will give the players the ability to balance the game according to what they believe is correct, and also allow them to do it much more quickly than ArenaNet does.

If players had this ability, we would have seen Dhuumfire and Healing Signet dropped to reasonable levels in days, not months. We would have had some of the Elementalist nerfs reverted months ago.

Tournaments would have been more diverse, and we probably would have had more of them.

This would also probably have spawned a balance team populated by the community who would have developed agreed-upon rulesets for playing the game. There could be different rulesets for tournaments, pugs, and dueling. These various rulesets could have differing parameters for various skills and abilities to help balance out the game.

The only downside to this is that you first have to read all your tooltips before you enter a match to see what that arena has set your skills to.

MartyPartys.9187:

The only downside to this is that you first have to read all your tooltips before you enter a match to see what that arena has set your skills to.

…and that’s not much of a downside!

What you describe would be the issue initially. Imagine when the config specs become commonplace. All you’d need to do is read “Custom Server X: Tourney Ruleset 2.1” and you’d know what’s there.

You could easily work around that by adding an info page for each custom arena.

Honestly, if this existed in-game, I’d buy and run 3 or 4 custom servers myself.