Guild Wars 2

The video is for super smash brothers, but it raises a similar issue with GW2 on it’s second obstacle.

Consistency (transcript)

“The second huge reason that sports become popular is that they’re CONSISTENT. Soccer is always soccer and basketball is always basketball. Soccer the sequel, or basketball 2 don’t exist. Professionals and fan never fear that the game is going to change in any significant way so pros can focus on becoming masters at their craft instead of re-learning a similar but distinct game every six years (3 months for gw2) and fans are given time to become truly familiar with the game. That’s how lifelong fans are born. The kind of fans that drive a sport to real success. …. Consistency is important because people can’t become masters at something if the rules keep changing, and mastery leads to the level of depth and amazing play that is necessary to draw in big crowds and more of the mainstream. Without it, players and audiences will have to keep starting over- and that takes all the momentum out of smash’s sales (guild wars 2’s sales) again and again.”

Other things, payouts, announcers (transcript)

There’s a couple other things that hinder smash (gw2), like tournament pay-out scales being kittening kitten, and the whole announcer situation. I really think they should change to a top 10 percent in the money payout, similar to poker tournaments. Having less than one percent on the field get paid is a joke and gives an incredibly small incentive for anyone but the top caliber of players to compete… there needs to be a move towards sport announcers have done for a long time. Have a play by play announcer and a color commentator. Not just two dudes who know the game; but hey, if the first two big reasons (one big reason: Inconsistency) aren’t fixed, it wouldn’t really matter.

Take notes ArenaNet. These apply to you and are a significant hindrance to GW2’s “ascension” to E-Sports. I made another post a while back asking arenanet to take balance more seriously, but the advice apparently wasn’t heeded.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/ANET-Take-more-time-if-needed

So there you have it.

If this will get more attention in the PVP forum, please move it there.

It isn’t exactly that GW2 isn’t consistent (league goes through a TON of meta shifts through item removals, overhauls, champ reworks, new champs, new objectives, etc). Its just that every time GW2 gets a rework, its never right. I’m not going to complain about how each meta always excludes a few classes each time, but I will say that the reward for skilled play is less and less noticeable as time goes on. Again (I’ll be making a lot of league references), league is a team game, but every player in the match has the chance to shine on their own pull some pretty insano plays (even supports).

Honestly, we could break down all of the differences between GW2 and league (or mobas in general), but I’ll keep it short and simple…..

Get rid of conquest. For the love of god, get rid of it. Courtyard was a slaughterfest with no real game flow. Stronghold can easily be won without interacting with the mist champions meaning teams have very little reason to interact with each other. Defenders (outside of the lord room) have very little bonuses to help them defend. In league, teams that fall in line fast enough to defend are capable of defending their base through more powerful base turrets, their spawn nearby for healing, and the minions. Should a team be defending too tightly and are simply biding their time until they can make an equalizing play, the winning team can further increase their strength by either split pushing another lane or taking advantage of the minibosses that spawn that grant the team that killed them further power that might allow them to break through the defending team’s defenses. Conquest, while promoting good rotations, is simply devoid of any real depth. The auxiliary map objectives either grant negligible bonuses (its usually best to leave things like treb and beasts alone) or are simply too good (lord rush at 350 and skyhammer). Dying means very little, there is no build up to plays. If one team simply holds two points and keeps deaths to a minimum, they’ll eventually win (which is why bunkers became progressively worse over time until they peaked and were crushed today).

Games like league have build ups for plays. Making aggressive plays to net a kill so you can force your opponent out of lane and shove the wave into their turret to further snowball your lead by denying your enemy gold or playing defensively and freezing the lane ever so perfectly so your jungler can come for the gank while you then proceed to snowball your lead, but while your jungler is ganking, the enemy jungler could be stealing objectives, counter jungling, gank another lane themselves, or slip in and turn the gank into a very bad situation by counterganking and netting their team a lead they can snowball. While all of this is happening, top lane could be teleporting to the bottom lane for a 3v2 tower dive because the enemy jungler can’t come in to intercept and the lead is essentially equalized. Note that I don’t have a 100% grasp (or even 50 if I’m entirely honest), but the point is the game is incredibly complex with many possibilities for games to play out. Conquest/Stronghold simply do not provide us the complexity and depth for plays that is required of a game that aspires to go big. Sports like soccer and basketball, while they haven’t changed much from their initial iteration, also have a ridiculous amount of depth to them from team wide plays to individual skill.

Idk tbh. GW2 needs to become an entirely different game for it to become anything remotely competitive. I always thought WvWvW should be getting more attention and could possibly carve a very sweet spot out for GW2 competitively.

I don’t think it matters. There will always be only a few game manage to break in the esports market.

The people that want to be professional gamer always pick the top games. If you subdivide the genre there are Moba, fps, RTS, card games. So that means only a few games in each genre can success.

And honestly, which mmorpg actually make the esports list. Maybe people are asking a bit too much.