Guild Wars 2

Dear Papa Grouch,

What’s up with Stronghold? Any plans for it? Updates (besides new champions), fixes? Maybe start some official feedback thread for it. It’s sad to see new game mode being, more or less, dead in Legendary division. It’s been some time since last major updates (that were made back in Beta Weekends I think) and I haven’t seen any mention of this new game mode in Mike O’Brien’s posts, just in AMA that new map is eventually coming, if I remember correctly.

It’s sad to see a new game mode that has potential dropping so low in interest due to no fixes that during official ESL Stronghold tournament no ESL admin even bothers to show up.

I think, the problem is more that the perception of the game’s quality declined. The problem is admitted by the Korean headquarters so I will consider it as a fact.

The aim to attract new players by the tournament is a good idea. However, as long as the base product is perceived badly, it will not work. It has even adverse effects (as the OP pointed out). There is obviously money available. Nevertheless, the money gets rather spent on some “pros” than on the core product. In other words, the customer will ask himself why he should continue spending money for the product when his money will not be used to improve the product but rather for some “pros”. I understand the reasoning (I dont want to say whether I follow it).

More dangerous is the problem of attracting new players. It may sound fun but I consider it as a problem right now. The game is perceived as “bad”. A new player coming would quite likely perceive it as bad as well and not buy HoT. What happens if the overall perceiption of the game’s quality increased? The activation costs to bring this player back to the game will have increased (once a bad experience, why better now?). In other words, attracting new players through e.g. a “pro”-league has currently rather negative monetary and brand value effects.

I entirely understand the concept behind the “pro”-league and I fully understand that it must be hard for a person highly involved and engaged to accept it. However, I cannot change the truth!

Let me make a simple analogy: Imagine you would be employed for Addidas. Addidas produces the ball for the football (in the US and Ireland soccer) world cup. They also sell the ball through their normal distribution channels. Now let us say Addidas developped a “crappy” ball which will fall apart after 3h playing with it. A “pro” player will not recognise it. A game lasts 90 min. A “casual” player will recognise it because he will not buy a new ball everytime he wants to play. What will happen then? The “casual” player will go to Nike or Puma and buy a ball there. If he is satisfied, he will of course stay with the brand (brand loyalty). What does it mean for Addidas? Sponsoring the world cup has even negative effects! It would have been better if the “casual” players did not buy an Addidas-ball in the first place.

And please dont thank me that you got the analysis for free (normally I get money for it (ofc it will look nicer and will be better explained etc.)). Just make sure that I have to shake my head over the management decisions of AreanNet less often and I will be happy.

Josh Davis.6015:

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team).

So.. You say, there are several people… going to work every day into the studio… working hard on class balance regarding all the gamemodes… and problems like biggest dps rotation is autohitting in pve or classes being complete trash tier in pvp exist for this amount of time.

The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

? They even get feedback, they can read the forums and steal 2245201 ideas from people’s posts…
I mean… i dont wanna trash people’s work, but the thing that they GET PAID FOR is the quality of Acrobatics traitline they reworked numerous times. I hope you get it.

Josh Davis.6015:

Agemnon.4608:

Snip.

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

grouch, split the balance and let the balance team balance pve and the pvp team balance pvp. at this point i feel like this really needs to be done. you always say it needs to be easy for new players and you can’t have your skills do different things when you go into pvp, but that’s not true. it was like that in gw1 too where it tolds you that some of your skills work differently. believe a bit more in your playerbase :^)

Josh Davis.6015:

Hi Frands,

I haven’t had much time to spend on the forums as of late and as a result I’ve unfortunately been mostly mum on these types of threads. Since many of you are fresh faces and didn’t visit the forums back when I used to frequent more often, I’ll reintroduce myself (in tl;dr format), and after that we’ll get down into the nitty gritty.

I’ve been at ArenaNet for a little under 3 years. Prior to that, I was a PvP fan just like yourselves. I ran multiple GW2 PvP-specific podcasts, hosted GW2Guru’s State of the Game (wow, that’s old), managed some of the earliest tournaments such as Curse’s Masters of the Mists, and casted dozens of other events (including the first ESL tournament and the 2013 Pax Invitational). Little known fact – in the early days I even played on Team Paradigm NA with Phantaram as well as a number of other teams. I was offered a job at ArenaNet in 2013, and after moving around to a few different teams I ended up on the marketing team as a Brand Manager. My time isn’t dedicated entirely to the PvP (I work with a number of other dev teams), but I am for all intents and purposes the “commissioner” of Pro League and most other events that we’ve run in the past.

Ok, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s address the OP’s question -> “200k on pros, why?”

Competitive play is something we’ve always been a fan of at ArenaNet – you could say that it’s a part of the company’s DNA, and it’s something we’re committed to supporting just like any other part of our game. The PvP team has been working hard to take PvP from where it was at launch to where it is today (seriously, think about it) and the marketing team has been keen on supporting them. Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome. After all, things like matchmaking quality and queue times gets better the more people that you have. It’s more or less my job to try to figure out how to replicate that growth as much as possible, and after looking at all the options available for the marketing team, we decided to go down an admittedly riskier path and dedicate some of our budget towards the Pro League initiative. I’ll add that most of Pro League’s costs were funded out of our paid media budget which fuels the advertising banners you’ve probably seen displayed on a variety of websites (or maybe you don’t, because it’s 2016 and you use ad-blockers, which is why initiatives like this are so important!).

There’s certainly a unique opportunity for growth here. We get to talk about our game in new interesting ways with an entirely new group of gamers – some of which may never had been interested in playing MMOs previously. It’s not often that you get to do that.

I think the main takeaway is that Pro League in no way takes away from development for any other aspects of the game (but I can understand how that assumption could be made), but the upside here is that when any part of the game grows – the entire game benefits. We’re not trying to make GW2 into a PvP MMO – it’s just one of the many facets of the game that we all love and want to see be even more successful.

Anyways, I’ll keep an eye on the thread for questions over the next few days, so feel free to AMA!

Hey Grouch (Nord!),

Not only hiding from forum, but from reddit or even from the Heart of the Mist.
My first question is:

1- Why the hell Anet delete important thread over a forum without giving explanation to all the participants of the thread?

2- Why don’t you package the Heart of the Mist only, as a MOBA package to Market the thing up like a MOBA (and not a freaking great MMORPG) so the real crowd (60 millions MOBA player) can look our great game?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/sPvP-needs-its-own-business-model

3- Why are you still working on a GRIND based (mmorpg carebear players) league system? All competitive players (moba/pvp players) want a skill based rank system.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Skill-based-or-Grind-based-rank-system

Thank you,

gloflop.3510:

I think, the problem is more that the perception of the game’s quality declined. The problem is admitted by the Korean headquarters so I will consider it as a fact.

The aim to attract new players by the tournament is a good idea. However, as long as the base product is perceived badly, it will not work. It has even adverse effects (as the OP pointed out). There is obviously money available. Nevertheless, the money gets rather spent on some “pros” than on the core product. In other words, the customer will ask himself why he should continue spending money for the product when his money will not be used to improve the product but rather for some “pros”. I understand the reasoning (I dont want to say whether I follow it).

More dangerous is the problem of attracting new players. It may sound fun but I consider it as a problem right now. The game is perceived as “bad”. A new player coming would quite likely perceive it as bad as well and not buy HoT. What happens if the overall perceiption of the game’s quality increased? The activation costs to bring this player back to the game will have increased (once a bad experience, why better now?). In other words, attracting new players through e.g. a “pro”-league has currently rather negative monetary and brand value effects.

I entirely understand the concept behind the “pro”-league and I fully understand that it must be hard for a person highly involved and engaged to accept it. However, I cannot change the truth!

Let me make a simple analogy: Imagine you would be employed for Addidas. Addidas produces the ball for the football (in the US and Ireland soccer) world cup. They also sell the ball through their normal distribution channels. Now let us say Addidas developped a “crappy” ball which will fall apart after 3h playing with it. A “pro” player will not recognise it. A game lasts 90 min. A “casual” player will recognise it because he will not buy a new ball everytime he wants to play. What will happen then? The “casual” player will go to Nike or Puma and buy a ball there. If he is satisfied, he will of course stay with the brand (brand loyalty). What does it mean for Addidas? Sponsoring the world cup has even negative effects! It would have been better if the “casual” players did not buy an Addidas-ball in the first place.

And please dont thank me that you got the analysis for free (normally I get money for it (ofc it will look nicer and will be better explained etc.)). Just make sure that I have to shake my head over the management decisions of AreanNet less often and I will be happy.

GW2 often comes up on other gaming sites and forums. The most considered opinion is:

’ Yeh that game used to be good but they didnt update it’. Or ’ It was a promising game but they ruined it’.

The problem is 3 years of directionless development have hurt the games reputation to the point it cannot ever be recovered. Think about it. They released with a vision for pvp. The trait system was considered to make the game one of give and take. Now the traits mean you can just take everything you want.

But a bigger problem is directionless pvp direction. No new competitive maps for over 3 years. Those maps released have been dropped completely instead on improving them. They added leaderboards. They got rid of leaderboards. They added solo queue. They got rid of solo queue. They used to let you queue in heart of the mists. They got rid of this. They used to have in game tournaments. They got rid of these.

Think about it. The list of features removed by anet is insane. Its like they change their pvp direction every year and just remove all the work they have done previously. I honestly think the game is worse now than it was a year after release in terms of the pvp infrastructure. Its suicidal development to not have a direction for their product. The result is a game with a ruined reputation. The problem could be many things. Almost certainly nobodies fault at anet. Could be high staff turnover (which will cause erratic development at times as new people will have different ideas). Could be directions from up top.

But its just amazing they have added and then removed so many features. It makes no sense. Find me another game who REMOVE their solo queue? Find me another game who REMOVE their leaderboards? After they were put into the game for a year. Its strange, and ye the game can never recover. Outside of the gw2 bubble its reputation is ruined.

Cyhann.2609:

Josh Davis.6015:

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

This might be the key to the biggest problem this game is facing.

And to add to the post, I feel like an initiative of this caliber should have been pushed when the hype was up to its level. There hasn’t been any sort of real advertisement for the proleagues and as some have mentioned, the fact that the game’s popularity is in decline made it all-the-worse. PvP rose by 135% mainly because you introduced Reward Tracks and F2P. But the truth of the matter is that it has gotten significantly worse.

The sole fact that every single new map you released (and deleted one … ?) is now considered utter trash should give you some huge, grandious and luminous pointers to what the right direction is – yet you stuck with senseless decisions and it is likely too late. Three years too late.

Edit: Not even going to mention the removal of leaderboards and other INHERENT competitive gaming traits.

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

honestly, i always thought that the pvp base grew largely due to the reward track implemented at the end of 2014. for this year will be due to the backpiece

Josh Davis.6015:

Stronghold definitely isn’t going anywhere, but our priority right now is conquest – both old and new.

I came back to this game mainly because of the stronghold news, I got 20 minutes+ q times even in ruby and and mostly Legacy maps which is a poor mans stronghold.
If you didn’t get it by now after 3,5 years, Conquest has no future to be a solid gamemode that actually works as something people enjoy to watch, but at least the mode itself is fully implemented. Stronghold is yet another unfinisheded product, and many people seem to have no clue how to play it all. Also how come archers are still useless? There was more than enough feedback on that even back in the first beta test. Also at least get some tools into the game to actually teach new Stronghold players how to use stuff / play it. Hotm still has many empty places, for example the place where you were able to use underwater golems.

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

Well I’m pretty sure it tanked hard before that though.

SkyShroud.2865:

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

honestly, i always thought that the pvp base grew largely due to the reward track implemented at the end of 2014. for this year will be due to the backpiece

Yup. In Wildstar there were 2 dungeons. The boring ones and the fun ones. The boring ones had better rewards. So they got exclusively played at the expense of the fun ones.

I think the biggest culprit is that nearly every WvW player I know was forced to move to PvP. Even a lot of (every???) high profile WvW streamers moved to PvP not out of want, but out of necessity.

I suspect the Alpine Borderland return will draw back a large number of roamers, but we’ll never know one way or the other.

SkyShroud.2865:

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

honestly, i always thought that the pvp base grew largely due to the reward track implemented at the end of 2014. for this year will be due to the backpiece

lol Yeah, I think it’s mostly the reward tracks and the re-vamped dailies that brought in tons of people that have never or had only rarely before ever pvped. I mean, the number of people I know that began pvping just because it became a fast way to do their dailies is kind of astonishing.

Whoever made this gif is a kittening genius! Its sad but its reflecting exactly whats wrong with anets management and why almost nobody can take this game seriously.

Josh Davis.6015:

Anyways, I’ll keep an eye on the thread for questions over the next few days, so feel free to AMA!

Hi Grouch. Long time no see.

3v3 Arenas?

Wahoo!

Chaith.8256:

Fivedawgs.4267:

Ikr, I def agree but those folks (pro players) have to be rewarded with something or this game will die in a sec.

E sport sure is garbage now, NA teams are getting worse day after day!!

Not true, matches on NA between top 3 teams are closer than ever.

I would also agree that without the “prize pool” offered to the pro league players the amount of teams actually showing up to play would dramatically decrease, if not die completely. That being said I’m sure there would be other teams to take the places of those people that have left, but difference in the quality of teams would be very noticeable.

Cyhann.2609:

Josh Davis.6015:

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

This is the biggest problem this game is facing currently.

I fixed it for you. But it doesn’t matter, the probability of this changing is just as slim as air turning into gold. However I hope I stand corrected someday.

Countless

Fluffball.8307:

forced to move to PvP

Pretty much, and with comments like these:

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year. It’s more or less my job to try to figure out how to replicate that growth as much as possible

You know why WvW is in the state it’s in.

Having said that with WvW in its current state, they’re not going to suck anymore numbers out of it.

Trigr.6481:

Chaith.8256:

Fivedawgs.4267:

Ikr, I def agree but those folks (pro players) have to be rewarded with something or this game will die in a sec.

E sport sure is garbage now, NA teams are getting worse day after day!!

Not true, matches on NA between top 3 teams are closer than ever.

I would also agree that without the “prize pool” offered to the pro league players the amount of teams actually showing up to play would dramatically decrease, if not die completely. That being said I’m sure there would be other teams to take the places of those people that have left, but difference in the quality of teams would be very noticeable.

what teams?before this league garbage there were acutally teams playing esl,academy gaming etc,now we have pro league and that s all,the game it s already going down.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Josh Davis.6015:

Agemnon.4608:

Snip.

RE: DotaCoach -> that’s a pretty slick website – thanks for sending it over. I’ve seen some initiatives like this run on our forums in the past. I’ll mull it over and see if there’s something a bit more structured we could do.

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

For reference, the PvP team is focused on infrastructure -> PvP Leagues and maps, for example.

Re: visibility -> agreed!

Edit: heading home for the evening. Will check back tomorrow.

The pvp team have released no new “competitive” maps since October 2012 btw. Worth remembering the facts

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

This certainly sounds impressive until you stop and think about it…

That means you a little over doubled the ACTIVE PvP population in the past year.

First, you need to define active? Play PvP 1 match a day? 1 match a week? 10 matches a day? By correctly defining “Active” I could double or even triple any aspect of the games population.

Second, there is no information on the % of players who are “active” in PvP. what was it last year? 5? 10%? 50%? If you doubled from 1% to 2% of the active population then 200K was a supreme waste of money.

Finally you fail to mention HoT launch and F2P. These two things more than doubled the active population of GW2 compared to before. Without putting these numbers in context they are meaningless. How much has the PvE population changed in the past year? fractal population? WvW population? If these sections of the game have grown by more than 100% with the launch of F2P and HoT then PvP has actually failed, not succeeded.

It’s pretty revealing that the original post in the topic earned an infraction for criticizing e-sports.

ANet wants this, no matter how expensive, futile, and ham-handed these efforts at artificially propping up an “e-sport” prove to be.

I’m sure last season people had fun. But it wouldn’t suprise me if smurfing increased 135% last season. This season it’s probably 300%. Sounds more like a ponzi scheme new membership program. Now PvP is basically torture to play. Pretty not awesome.

Thuggernaut.1250:

It’s pretty revealing that the original post in the topic earned an infraction for criticizing e-sports.

ANet wants this, no matter how expensive, futile, and ham-handed these efforts at artificially propping up an “e-sport” prove to be.

Opinions against esl will be automatically infracted :P

JK aside it looks that it damages more the image of the game than it helps, while they could mantain this esl “idiotic and obtuse” propaganda, they could also within time bring what gw was very good in the pvp genra, if they had the game balanced towards 8 man party i believe we would see more tactical game play (instead having this heavy gimmick wars that is freaking bored to play and watch), gw2 could gather more viewers on 8 man GvG like the old style with a ladder, yet they could mantain the fast spvp to esp only.

Yet they balance the pvp to a fast action game, where the only skill iteration seams to be wich class will not work and what will be overboosted to atract players, it is a strange process that is killing the classes.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

This certainly sounds impressive until you stop and think about it…

That means you a little over doubled the ACTIVE PvP population in the past year.

First, you need to define active? Play PvP 1 match a day? 1 match a week? 10 matches a day? By correctly defining “Active” I could double or even triple any aspect of the games population.

Second, there is no information on the % of players who are “active” in PvP. what was it last year? 5? 10%? 50%? If you doubled from 1% to 2% of the active population then 200K was a supreme waste of money.

Finally you fail to mention HoT launch and F2P. These two things more than doubled the active population of GW2 compared to before. Without putting these numbers in context they are meaningless. How much has the PvE population changed in the past year? fractal population? WvW population? If these sections of the game have grown by more than 100% with the launch of F2P and HoT then PvP has actually failed, not succeeded.

Remember a few years back when they were bragging about how great the numbers for WvW were. Everyone was suspicious… and then it turned out they were including the EotM karma train numbers. Same thing here.

Yo Grouch, thanks for answer regarding Stronghold. Hope to see old things fixed and new stuff added to Conquest then. One more question/suggestion:

Josh Davis.6015:

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

Have you (as ArenaNet) considered going back to the idea of Forum Profession Specialists, similar to PvP, PvE etc. forum ones? I think it could be a reasonable help and maybe bring some life back to discussions, since people would know their feedback is not going into the void. Or maybe monthly discussion threads on each profession’s forum with Balance Team? Or maybe monthly profession discussion with one of the Devs on topics provided by Forum Specialist?

Reddit or more general forums can’t cover serious feedback discussions like these and profession subforums are good place for such things.

Cheers,

Rym

Thuggernaut.1250:

It’s pretty revealing that the original post in the topic earned an infraction for criticizing e-sports.

ANet wants this, no matter how expensive, futile, and ham-handed these efforts at artificially propping up an “e-sport” prove to be.

Careful talking about infractions gets infracted, It’s happened to me before. They don’t like when people question them!

Lord Kuru.3685:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Josh Davis.6015:

Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome.

This certainly sounds impressive until you stop and think about it…

That means you a little over doubled the ACTIVE PvP population in the past year.

First, you need to define active? Play PvP 1 match a day? 1 match a week? 10 matches a day? By correctly defining “Active” I could double or even triple any aspect of the games population.

Second, there is no information on the % of players who are “active” in PvP. what was it last year? 5? 10%? 50%? If you doubled from 1% to 2% of the active population then 200K was a supreme waste of money.

Finally you fail to mention HoT launch and F2P. These two things more than doubled the active population of GW2 compared to before. Without putting these numbers in context they are meaningless. How much has the PvE population changed in the past year? fractal population? WvW population? If these sections of the game have grown by more than 100% with the launch of F2P and HoT then PvP has actually failed, not succeeded.

Remember a few years back when they were bragging about how great the numbers for WvW were. Everyone was suspicious… and then it turned out they were including the EotM karma train numbers. Same thing here.

I am a PVE-only. I hate PVP.
Then I saw the rank farm servers. I made every single reward track without a fight plus the easy dailies. Now I have the rank Tiger (no fight). On my way to Dragon

PVE girl pushes PVP numbers

^^Working as intended or epic fail?

jessiestiles.9437:

^^Working as intended or epic fail?

as intended because I need …
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Phoenix_rank_emote.jpg

FIRE

pvp needs to be separate from WvW and PvE, it’s too constraining for all three game modes to be balanced on the same platform and way too easy to break the game. Make PvP separate and we might actually get somewhere.

Just watched the first few minutes from this match.

then I watched the first few minutes (of the actual match) of Dota (youtubegoogled for dota championship)

I played neither game(mode) but the main thing I noticed is that GW2 PvP is impossible to spectate if you are anything but a fly. everything is just way way waaaay too fast. Even if you speed up the dota match to twice the speed, the viewing experience is so much nicer, you can actually see things and begin to understand what is going on. Slowing down the gw2 video to 0.5 makes it viewable at least.

The gw2 game consists of flashes, sparkles and more flashes. the commentary feels removed from what you see on screen as for whatever they’re saying, it was already over 10 actions ago.
The changing of perspectives every few seconds doesn’t really help but I also got the feeling that it doesn’t matter too much either, since watching flashes & sparkles here or there doesn’t make a difference.

You see skill effects and not the players skills. And there is skill involved, a lot of it. I only know this because I play gw2 though and I would perish within seconds in this match.

Now, esports doesn’t mean the viewer needs to have a good experience but it would surely help to monetize this game mode.

Maybe I watched the wrong game mode though, I’ve heard about the moba style mode which sounds a lot more comprehensive, I couldn’t find it on the gw2 youtube.

Additionally, where are the explanations on team composition, builds and player introduction?
I also noticed, there are only 5 out of 9 professions in the game, this doesn’t look so good to a PvE player. Do the other classes really bring nothing to the team composition? is it because most professions can do mostly everything and don’t rely on specialists (pun intended)?

Why does PvP use the same skill set PvE does? Balancing must be close to impossible. It’s like balancing starcraft units for a counter strike game, just doesn’t make much sense.

Anything that brings players, viewers and cash to the game is great so I figured I’d share my thoughts when watching this game.

I’m also quite curious why ArenaNet has stopped promoting their tournaments with carrots on the stick like precursor giveaways on streams. Yes, that’s quite cheap and brings PvE players, but you have to drag them there somehow to show that Season 2 is much better than infamous Season 1. Some may get interested. Even other big e-sports games have tons of such carrot giveaways.

So 135% you say in pvp? Add a legendary backpack and ascended armor drops in wvw and you will see pvp drop 75% and wvw 300% grows!
The statistics you are seeing are blinding you!

I do praise the effort of bringing more ppl to pvp. I mean the backpack brought me to pvp. I was a casual pvp player but now full time.
And guys I mean not sure what your thinking someone had to think of the idea of backpack for pvp. Appreciate the team for that. Good idea, implementation may have been good on paper but it’s kinda meh..
On topic like a guy above me said combat is fast but that’s not gonna change without massive and dractic changes. People who watch the fight should know ways happening due to flashes and a lot of skills beeing cast.
And for gods sake bring a better comentor, i watched it a few times and they seem to be struggling. I mean no wonder since they do need to explain everything because it’s going on as fast as it is but still..
Not saying they are bad but..