Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed in my year of playing that every time “balancing” comes into play it is never supported by the videos you see on youtube from elite players or guilds, what the general playerbase feels, or even often times what the basic theoretical math has to say about things. It feels as though the devs look at a chart, say “there’s not enough of this” and nerf/buff that class in comparison to only itself. So with that having been said, here’s a few things I feel would actually help out balancing:

1) implement a voting system for changes, and don’t allow reversal of the change to be an option. Let’s be honest, buffing one weapons auto attack isn’t your ONLY idea when balancing, it’s the one you picked. Let the playerbase decide with you instead. Maybe they’d prefer one of your other options.
2) Allow comprehensive numbers from your charts, or even some form of data as to why the change is occurring. None of this “it’s too strong” “not used enough” fluff wording. I’m pretty sure the playerbase would be a lot more supportive in changes if they knew how OP some things actually were or how bad some were. and use cross-profession data to support any sort of DPS or healing claim so you don’t throw them off the meta.
3)Acknowledge or link some videos that back up the claim if possible. If someone is posting a video of your game it means they highly support it, and there’s no harm in throwing a little love back while making a point about a change (throw on a disclaimer even, like “they aren’t employed by ANet”).
4)To prevent people from picking changes that’d make their favorite class too OP, make some sort of training golem room where people (who don’t even have that class) can actually experience the changes before they occur. Maybe even make it a real dungeon that gives you like a gold a run, and make the entire team vote on the usefulness of the class. Make some rooms identical and make the changes not appear in one, and some they appear. This would allow you to actually grab data from the changes in real time from large quantities of teams, and allow players to give input on if the change is necessary or warranted or even useful.

Anyway, these are my ideas. If anyone else has their own throw it in the forum, and maybe the Devs will take at least one or two into account (hopefully). Obviously I love this game, it’s like a relaxing ride. I just wish they’d pick some roads that weren’t so bumpy, and it’d be nice if I could offer feedback to avoid that.

I don’t think that design by committee is the best way to go about assuring balance. Your testing suggestion relies on people restraining themselves, while many would be. fine with their builds being overpowered.

I am glad that you are trying to improve balancing in the game, or how the gw2 population feels about balancing. However, I personally do not feel that many of your ideas would necessarily be beneficial, and may ultimately just take up more of the dev’s time that could be used to work on something else.

1. Pleeeease no. This might work in a perfect world, but probably not in reality. I do not have the numbers, however, I would say its a fair guess that there are far more players that play PvE than sPvP or WvW. Therefore, if there was vote by numbers, it is quite possible that you would see skills constantly favor PvE or PvE balance rather than the other two game types. Further more, I am sure favoritism between classes in not exactly even as well. For example, if there are far more people that play elementalists, than an ele skill getting a buff or not getting a nerf could be a lot more/less likely than an engi under the exact same situation. Eventually, this may even cause a run away effect where ele is more powerful, therefore a larger percentage of the population invests time into eles (either gold, skill, or experience), therefore, a lot larger percentage of the population is against ele nerfs even though in reality they could be justified. The exact opposite could happen to a class like engi. Engi is not very powerful, therefore, a smaller percentage of the population wants to invest or spend time on the class, therefore, a smaller percentage of the population really could care what happens to engis. Finally, frankly many people who would be allowed to vote simply would not have the in game knowledge of how to balance or what to balance. Now, thats not saying that some or many people in the community don’t have that knowledge, its just saying many people don’t. After all, many of the people who vote could be immature kids who want something completely different than “balance”. Therefore, voting could just lead to an insanely huge runaway power creep.

2. This could be good, . . . . . orrr it could be really bad. The problem is data is just that, data. Data still needs an interpretation, and many people may/could disagree on what that interpretation is. For example, lets just theoretically say (obviously not true), that eles do 10% more damage than the second highest dps class. Anet than posts this as a reason why they are nerfing else’s to reduce their dps by roughly 5%. The problem is, why many people may see that as justified, many others would not see it that way because eles with those types of high dps builds are one of the squishiest classes in the game. There is also the problem with different classes having different strengths and weaknesses and how “strong” those strengths or “weak” those weaknesses should be is not a straight up answer. Ultimately, posting such data could even end up leading to more fighting and disagreeing with each other than just accepting the changes. Cross-Profession data is also not necessarily always the answer because profesions are suppose to, are, and should be different from one another. That is the way it should be.
The problem is also that many people do realize how OP or weak some skills may be, yet they still disagree with the changes, not even necessarily because they didn’t think those changes should have occurred, but because they think Anet took it too far, or didn’t take it far enough. In fact, I think this is really where the majority of complaints come from, that along with HOW the nerf was done or enacted, and how that change affects all game types.

3. I am not sure if you mean Anet posting their own videos or referencing others videos. I don’t think its wise for Anet to reference others videos for reasons not all entirely related to this topic. However, either way, this largely gets grouped up into #2 as videos are data as well.

4. The problem with giving the population a golem or a dungeon to test balance changes on is that neither of them come even remotely close to crossing all 3 game types. For example, how are you suppose to tell how a WvW boon share build, or a 10 man raid build, would do on a dummy or 5 man dungeon? How is a golem or dungeon suppose to tell you if the class is balanced for PvP? Anet obviously has the tools to test these kinds of changes before they are released into the game. I think we should just let them do their “golem” tests or whatever other tests they do on their own. Then after releasing it into the game they can wait about a month to see how things are going and receive player feedback before making the finale tweaks on the balance change, just like how they do now when they release a balance change after a PvP season, wait about a month, and then may make small changes again before the next PvP season starts.