Guild Wars 2

When the expansion comes there will be unbalance, and Arena Net, if you want your PvP system to prevail, you need to come out with more PvP updates than just 1 every 6 months.

EDIT: what does the community think about this?
(Now it’s not a call-out thread)

Yeah ANet if you mess up on the expansion and you don’t balance for 6 months any chance of “esports” is dead, pretty much guaranteed.

Please do not do call out threads….

If you want to know what the community thinks, I’ll tell you what I think.

I think a post on a forum isn’t going to change their software development methodology. I think there are multiple cogent reasons why you don’t want to release frequent balance changes in a game, including but not limited to:

1. Knee-jerk reactions by the community are emotional responses to their anecdotal experience, and are therefore extremely unreliable.

2. Metas take time to develop, regardless of how many people on the forums claim phenomenal cosmic mastery over GW2.

3. They’re balancing an entire game, not just PvP. Yes, if they really wanted to drive the eSport home they’d focus balance around PvP and let the other modes “deal with it”, but you can still have respectable balance without making monthly updates. Some would argue balance is already respectable, based on what I’ve seen around here.

4. Not only do metas take time to develop overall, but it also takes time for people to test things in vacuums, solo queue, WvW, and team queue. Even if a change to a class doesn’t drop a bomb on the meta for that class, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t raised the bar to a point that needs to be re-evaluated from a balance perspective.

Every 6 months is probably too infrequent, but I think if anything is completely hosing things in sPvP, they’ll be looking at it.

And if they don’t make some change people are clamoring over right away, maybe it’s because people are being silly and just hopping on the “yell about stuff” bandwagon instead of actually trying to deal with it. Forums are full of loud people who are fresh out of the game from the thing that frustrates them most. Balance should be a logical exercise, not really an emotional one.

If you want to change how the game makes you feel, you’re talking about design, and you should take a moment to evaluate what exactly is making you feel that way. Odds are it isn’t the exact thing you’re raging about.

But I digress.

TL;DR – Just because some people on a forum want a few things changed doesn’t mean they need to be changed. Data-driven decisions based on the analysis of a significant amount of data are a better idea than “people on the forum are angry, let’s change it right now so they won’t be angry” (tip: people will always be angry about something on the forums).

I would believe that if games like League of Legends didn’t come out with updates 10 times faster, which results in a much healthier meta for everyone involved.

The thing is, even if they make a mistake by patching too fast, they also fix that mistake much faster. We don’t end up with situations where some builds are obviously dominant for 5-6 months in a row without a single meaningful change.

Constantly nerfing/buffing things every month or less actually makes it harder to balance the game.

Games like LoL and DOTA have the flexibility of throwing the meta on its head because the hero pool is so large. I honestly believe that a lot of the changes I’ve seen in DOTA 2 have been “just because”. Some of them seem huge, they throw them in swathes, and the game still retains balance. Sure, some heroes are picked almost every game, but even then, often those heroes will find themselves against the full brunt of professional teamwork to counter, and when spectators see what pros are doing, they go do that in their pubs.

Just because the shoe fits a few popular MOBAs doesn’t mean the shoe fits an MMO. Otherwise, who cares if 5-6 of the 8 classes are the main ones seen in competitive games in GW2? Just roll a level 2 and pick up the class, then compete with it. People complain about balance so much because they are attached to their character/class more often in an MMO. If they weren’t, they’d roll the thing that stomps something like a turret Engi until turret Engis completely disappeared in the face of sheer aggression towards the build.

When people are emotionally invested in one or two of the vastly fewer total number of classes in a game, the developer is forced to tiptoe through the tulips, even if they’ve provided players with a system where they can play a different class in competitive PvP extraordinarily easily.

When I play DOTA 2, I play a few select heroes because I enjoy their mechanics. Sometimes, the other team will hard-counter what I pick because I pick it right away in AP mode. In a subset of those games, there’s nothing I can do, and if my team doesn’t carry, we lose.

Do I complain about balance because the things they picked countered the thing I picked? No, because I could have picked something else.

But no one ever considers the possibility they could play something that counters the build they hate. Not in an MMO.

That said, I don’t disagree with shaking things up and doing smaller changes more frequently, then having occasional big changes as well. I’m all about iterative development, and iterating at a snail’s pace is irritating. However, I do think some context is required for the situation this game/genre is in, and I think if we’re going to apply rules for balance timelines to this game that other successful MOBAs have, then we need to enforce other attributes of those games on GW2, including the choice of team comp based on opponents.

After such a huge patch they should wait a few weeks at least, to let the meta settle a bit. There’s a lot of new stuff coming, so people need to find the new top builds and tricks. If something is completely broken, though, they should fix it immediately! Which is something they tend to not do….

I gotta say that if they do in fact ruin the balance completely and don’t do anything for two months, then I’m probably leaving this game for half a year until the next balance patch. I’ll play through the PvE stuff and get my masteries, and then we’ll see.

Balance is the best it’s ever been imo.

I don’t even think NCSOFT gives Arenanet enough money.

And i do believe WildStar has released more Majors patches than Guild Wars 2.

Don’t forget that we have zero idea if the expansion will contain updates/patches for the other classes to provide said balance. I’m not talking about new mechanics or anything, but making some skills stronger, or weaker, depending on the situation. Anet does want balance, and tries to do just that. But it’s more than a simple “add X% more damage for this skill, and reduce CD of this skill by X%” You change on skill on a profession, and it will effect that profession, and other skills used with it, as well as other professions that play against it.

Someone posted this a couple weeks ago (sorry, don’t remember what your forum name is dude), which I quite enjoyed reading.
It’s quite long, so I’ll quote one section I strongly agreed with:

A balance update is to a PvP’er what a new Living World episode is to a PvE’er.

This is so true! I really enjoy tinkering with my builds, and it’s always a treat when they change a trait a bit, or add a new sigil to pvp that I can try out. Even when they turn out to be meh, at least I’ve had fun testing it. New stuff is FUN! Knowing what the optimal builds are and playing nothing else for month after month after month just leads to boredom, disillusionment, and burnout.
And I encourage people to scroll down to the “Successful eSports Games Update Regularly and Often” section and just look at the graphs. They’re very telling.

Shiyo.3578:

Balance is the best it’s ever been imo.

This^

As long as you want to see d/d cele ele, rifle cele engi, and shoutbow cele warrior dominate all the time :p

You can’t excuse ANet just because there are fewer professions. All that happens if they make Elementalists weak for a few patches is they move some profession up to take their place.

A feature patch every 6 months doesn’t even mean that balance meaningfully changes every 6 months. Look at Necromancer, when was the last time it was meaningfully changed? Deathly Perception allowed power builds to float around highish tier, and condi has existed nearly unchanged since Dhuumfire was nerfed (ironically one of the only times ANet has ever quickly responded to balance, and only because they had a big tournament coming up).

No one (reasonable) is asking for ANet to simply nerf everything good and buff everything bad every 2 weeks. But making small, incremental changes every month would be nice. Especially because due to our build system you could make a dozen changes to a profession without affecting their “OP” build at all. We’ve seen this a bit (though too rarely) with Necromancer, where they’ve mostly left condi Necro alone while making small changes to power builds and unused utilities.

Bhawb.7408:

….

No one (reasonable) is asking for ANet to simply nerf everything good and buff everything bad every 2 weeks. But making small, incremental changes every month would be nice. Especially because due to our build system you could make a dozen changes to a profession without affecting their “OP” build at all….

^This

Also, making balance changes more often, is good PR. It shows the community that the developer is invested into the playerbase. That they are paying attention to how their game is played and want to improve it.

I’m sorry sounds like everyone here works in game industry and studied in depth analysis of how E-sports marketing works. It’s a wonder why corporations won’t hire these experts to analyze future markets for potential esports market growth as well as economic values. To put it in simplest way as possible, unless you are a world renowned journalist who studied so much about gaming market and advertisement including analysis of E sports audience and marketing, do not make predictions about future as if you are the one who can speculate it correctly.
If you think you can, you would be the one in charge right now calling the shots. So please leave “e-sports” out of it and discuss balance patch only.

Wait, I don’t see why the small number of classes has anything to do with the frequency of balance patches. And I DEFINITELY don’t get the relevance of comparing the number of professions GW2 has to the number of heroes/champions a MOBA has!

First of all, a single hero from a MOBA is IN NO WAY equivalent to a profession from GW2. The notion that DOTA2’s Alchemist = GW2’s Engi, for instance, is ludicrous. A DOTA2 hero is pretty specialised, with only a small amount of customisation options. Broadly speaking, each hero will fall within one or more of the support/carry/initiator roles, and there are several heroes who can all fulfil the same roles with minor variation in their abilities and gameplay styles. Sure, LOL has even more, but that’s partly because of their pay-to-unlock business model making it necessary for them to have the most optimal champion for each role locked behind a paywall.

Each profession in GW2, otoh, has multiple viable (not optimal, but viable) builds available to it. A bunker guardian plays completely differently to a dps guardian – you can never get that huge a difference from a single hero in DOTA no matter how different your choices in levelling and gear acquisition are! Moreover, each of those builds has a number of minor variations you can make to it. Sure, your amulet and weapons basically define your build, but you have lots of customisation options in your utilities, sigils, runes, and exact trait loadout. Plenty of conditionmancers run greater Marks rather than Reaper’s Protection, for instance, or any of 3 different Soul Reaping Master traits, Rabid instead of Carrion, Spectral Armour rather than Spectral Walk, sigil of Frailty rather than Energy or Geomancy, or any of a huge number of variations, each of which has a small but tangible influence on the gameplay!

When you count all these builds and all these minor variations to these builds, you’ll find that GW2 (and ANY MMO as a matter of fact) actually has a lot more character choices than any MOBA! I’m talking an order of magnitude more, not just a few more! And that’s the case even if you only count the viable pvp builds – once you start counting the just-plain-bad builds you can make then we’re starting to talk about thousands of possible builds!

Come to think of it tbh, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this post: I have no idea what “MOBAs can afford to balance more frequently because they have more heroes than GW2 has professions” means! In fact the opposite is true, because surely in an MMO with only 8 classes, if one class is the developer’s one-eyed, asthmatic, ginger stepchild, then you’re disappointing a full 12.5% of your playerbase who main that class. Sure, a few of them will just play something else, but they won’t be as happy as if they could play their favourite class. In a moba with 100 champions, though, if one champion is kitten, you’re only disappointing 1% of your playerbase for whom that champion is their favourite. Not to mention the fact that people in MOBAs don’t form as close emotional attachments to individual champions as MMO gamers, who had to level them up over hudreds of hours and obsess over their gear and looks, do with their main characters, so not being able to play them in pvp because they’re as sub-par as an ele in 2013 is a far bigger disappointment.

So yeah, I’m sorry but that argument is just plain rubbish. Less character choice greates a greater need for frequent balance, not a smaller one. And even if it weren’t, I think I proved above that it’s factually wrong in its essentials: once you count all possible builds, GW2 does not in fact have smaller character choice than any MOBA, but far greater.

Cogbyrn.7283:

3. They’re balancing an entire game, not just PvP. Yes, if they really wanted to drive the eSport home they’d focus balance around PvP and let the other modes “deal with it”, but you can still have respectable balance without making monthly updates. Some would argue balance is already respectable, based on what I’ve seen around here.

Actually the majority of changes are in fact ‘deal with it’ changes all for the sake of conquest spvp, the only one I can think of that are not on ones that had no effect on spvp at all i,e, were not included in the mode.

As for balance frequency I am concern all the increase would do at best would just be a hokey-pokey of which professions are in and which are out.

manveruppd.7601:

Come to think of it tbh, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this post: I have no idea what “MOBAs can afford to balance more frequently because they have more heroes than GW2 has professions” means!

I tried to go back and find that conclusion in the posts I wrote, and I couldn’t, so I’m not sure why you posted that much either. Hardly any of it was relevant to what I was talking about, nor the point I was making.

Emotional attachment to characters, and even builds, causes people to clamor for changes the instant they feel underpowered. But it takes more than an instant to determine if you’re actually underpowered, or if you’re doing it wrong. Beyond that, it takes time to evaluate whether or not proper teamwork can cover up the underpoweredness and allow you to shine. Since this is a team game. Whenever I see Necros talking about how they just get chain CC’d, I wonder “What’s your team doing?” If nothing to save you, then you taking all the heat is part of the team strategy, or your team isn’t playing like a team in a team game, so you should be blaming your team first. I also wonder if teams every try to bait over-extension with their Necros, but unfortunately my pool of professional/top-tier games to watch and analyze is very small, so all I do is end up wondering.

So what exactly dictates the need for making a change, testing the change, then pushing the change out? It certainly isn’t forum tears. Is it when most people are doing the same build, like Might-stacking? Maybe, but what if that meta develops, then players counter-develop another meta over the next few weeks to strip/corrupt boons? Perhaps it took a few weeks for a build/set of builds to take hold, do you give it another few weeks then just in case? If so, you’re at a month or more of time already where you’re just gathering data and seeing how it plays out.

So really, I feel 2 months is probably about “par” for balance changes. Then again, it depends on how much time it takes for their testing process for changes. 1.5 – 2 months to decide on the changes that need to be made (aggressively estimating), .5 – 1 month to implement and test the changes, then it’ll be scheduled for a patch in one of the 2-week windows, perhaps a week or two later. Optimistically, that’s already 2.5ish weeks, up to potentially 3.5.

Every 6 months is too infrequent to me, but I wouldn’t expect anything too frequent either, personally. Naturally all of the above is guessing based on my own experience with how development cycles and larger projects work, though my experience may not translate exactly to their system. I just don’t have my expectations set very high.

i agree with you Jelzouki. I never hear about 6 month except here. Ok i will not compare with other game, that is why pvp player do not feel interest to play pvp because of long wait=not vigilant to fix or tweak game with balance and fix problem. Vigilant is important for any game company to be serious for improve game and fix problem in game. 6 month is not vigilant at all.

Example; If landlord in house tell you that you will have to wait for 6 month to fix problem in the house, would you be ok?

Be vigilant is to keep update frequent, not wait, wait long time. I do not understand, pvp is very popular game mode in mmo game, why it is not need frequent update in this game? also, why it is not need frequent attention in this game? i do not get it at all.

If something is popular, why not be vigilant to make it grow?