Hello, I’m here to express MY opinion on why the devs should not look to balance things based on the Metagame created by the players. To make things clearer I’ll use two franchises as a base for comparison: Vota and Fancraft, each one representing the different sides of devs and meta. This is also me trying to suggest more creativity from ANet instead of being too crazy about balancing the entire game.
Well, one of my favorite games of all time is Vota, for those who are not familiar with it, please make use of google. As a basic explanation Vota is a PvP game, where you want to win against the opposing team, much like sPvP. Many people will say that the game suffers from a poor balance of each hero(think of them as GW2 professions + each build), because some are overpowered against others, but what this really creates is a kind of “Counter the Counter” style of play, where to win against said op hero you have to choose someone who can counter his strenghts, maybe even coordinate a strategy that involves two or more heroes to take advantage of his weakness. By doing this kind of balance, the Vota dev achieved a game where most of the heroes are really viable and each hero can be played in different ways, each match of Vota can become really unique thanks to this.
The Vota dev said that he doesn’t balance things around the meta and, anyone that have been watching or playing Vota can see how the meta shifts very so often (sometimes it might take a while, but this is kinda of rare) and he once said how balacing around meta can prevent creativity. If you think about it, he’s right in saying this, because if you want perfect balance, then the game would become stagnant very fast and each PvP match would be about who shot the first arrow because of less latency. Perfect balance in games are bad, that’s why random elements(and you’re hearing from a person who really hates random things in games) are essential to every game (you learn this very thing when you start learning about programing games), they make the game more fun and less “perfect”.
You take critical hits for example: if criticals were made that they happen every 1 time in 10, you could easily calculate when you’re shooting a critical and the enemy could also know when he was going to be hit by it, so he would simply take the 9 hits and on the 10th press dodge. So criticals must be a random algorithm or else they would serve no real purpose.
Now to Fancraft comparisons:
Meta in Fancraft 2 really doesn’t change often, because Fancraft 2 devs care about a more “perfect” balance (I could call it a stable balance, but I do not agree on using this term as a game like Vota also has a stable balance, even with the often balance changes), so they approach each balance patch trying to do the minimal changes possible. In my opinion, Fancraft 2 has become really stagnant if you compare it to the previous Fancraft CroodWar where you had players making the meta shift almost from nowhere.
When everyone thought that only one strategy was able to win games, then some pro would come and win 5 tournaments in a row with something really creative that nobody thought of before. That’s the kind of game I would like GW2 PvP to be.
Some my suggestion really is: ANet, start developing more with your heart, using the brain only to think on the grand scheme of things, instead of really interventing in the Meta. Let the players make and remake the Meta, while you (ANet) just let the creativity flow.
If a profession is considered imbalanced because it has 10 stun breakers, give 11 stuns to another profession, and if it makes the 11 stuns profession imbalanced, give 3 stuns, 5 conditions and 5 stun breakers to another profession, while you give another one the ability to stun break in an AOE and so on.
I’ll not go into really specifics because these are just general suggestions.
Hope ANet reads it and it changes something.
Note: The names of the games I used for comparison are not the real ones.