Guild Wars 2

Let me start this off by saying I don’t think GW2’s balance is really that horrible. There are some things that really surprise me with how long they go without being noticed or changed (when I was maining a Thief, Vital Shot’s busted DPS was the most obvious problem in the universe for literally 3 1/2 years before it was finally updated, for example).

But, I have a huge, huge problem with the fact that balance updates only happen an average of once every two-three months. That’s ridiculous, and a terrible way to manage the game. All it does is three very harmful things to the game, with no benefits at all that I can see:

a.) Things that are obviously a bit busted end up being left alone for way, way too long, causing frustration to build among players with limited to no catharsis.

b.) It creates a cultural issue where balance patches are built up too much in the minds of players, which exaggerates the emotional response when they are released.

c.) It leads to a stale meta problem – players lose interest in the game because it’s too static with no incentive to regularly experiment with new builds.

Ultimately, it’s kind of one of those things where too much analysis and bureaucracy ends up becoming counter-productive. Balance will never be perfect, so it makes way more sense to iterate quickly and without excessive analysis, especially since the analysis this game has appears to not be very good. This is why most online games release balance patches weekly or biweekly. It’s the obviously better way to do it. It’s also why we should have more skills available at this point than we do.

You may be right, but in the current status, it has to be done carefully.

Indeed, one thing you forgot about the frequency is balance fixes lead to a quick discover of “meta/cheese” builds that use synergies in the new set of skills/traits etc. which eventually makes them better than current “meta/cheese” builds that will be nerfed.

So, you can be sure that as soon as a balance patch is out, there’s a wall of “plz nerf this !” from people who have been nerfed and are failing against builds that have been bossted. Or threads “okay, ANet decided to kill put profession or meta here”.

In a nutshell : there’s an adaptation time so that people will get the fixes, agree they’ll have to deal with it, may think of new builds if they want to change, test them and get used to them. And this is how a new meta blooms.
On another hand, increasing the frequency may be a way to “keep things blurred”, hence prevent the meta/cheese trend. And so, work for diversity.

It has to be thought of.