Here is my suggestion to put GW2 back in the top MMO position.
Take a financial risk: Hire 10-15 temporary programmers for one month only, put them all in the skill designing/fixing/balancing team, at least two programmers per profession, and let them work 8 hours a day on nothing but skill balancing, fixing and improving, for one whole month. Don’t downgrade anything, have your two permanent programmers do that later when necessary, for this mega patch only changes and upgrades.
Make a big marketing deal out of it, tell people every single skill is getting an assessment, useless skills removed, better skills added, bad skills improved, etc. Avoid wasting too much time on bugs that are too complicated, unless they are absolutely vital. I realize some bugs will need months, if not years, to get fixed.
Create a temporary limited-access forum, invite players with huge Spvp (not wvw) statistics to join the discussion there to help the programmers. Only those players who get invited, based on their spvp experience/statistics, have access. This doesn’t include me right now, but I just know that this approach works because of my experience with improving skill balance in other games, the devs eventually kept the limited-access forum, allowing more people to join based on their spvp experience to help the programmers with suggestions and advice.
Kind of an elite forum, as a side effect giving people a major incentive to get good at spvp, since this elite forum would have much more active dev talk. You have to realize that a player who does spvp 5 hours a day or so (not me), has far more insight into skill balance than any of the devs, as they simply don’t have the resources to spend that much time playing and testing skills and builds. I know from experience that devs like to think they fully understand their game, anyone would, that’s just natural, but because they just cannot play it that much, they don’t, and a player who spends insane amounts of time pvping with all the professions (not me), simply knows better, and should be asked to help the skill programmers. With some of the games I assisted, the devs ended up assigning a profession-master, and relied on him entirely for skill changes. They asked him to write up a monthly report for his class (each class one class-master), and applied all the changes from his list that they decided were feasible and practical. It worked wonderfuly. The class-master gets his ideas from his own experience and from talking to players who main in that specific profession. I’m not saying this is how it should be done here, I’m just explaining how important experienced players are for game balance.
Anyway,
I guarantee you that at the end of that month, you will have very happy players that spend a ton of cash on the gem store, you will earn back the money you spent on the programmers within a few weeks, and you end up with a much better game and much happier players.
One more thing: assign one employee to talk to people on the forums, a few hours a day, from monday to friday. You don’t even have to hire someone, just ask a knowledgable player, give him access to plans/designs/meetings, and he will talk to the players for free, answering their questions and talking to them about future plans of the dev team and responding rapidly to major bugs that are going on, to assure players there isn’t a stealth nerf going on, things like that.
(edited by Zsymon.8457)