Guild Wars 2

I agree generally. Good points. One thing though, I strongly suspect that the majority of pvp players are or were pve players. As you pointed out, this is not a pure pvp game and really isn’t set up to be.

Yes, I’m better at pve and yes I’m grinding ( and stressing ) away in leagues in the hope of earning my wings. Yes, I want to earn them and yes I want to be able to.

A place exists for high level and highly competitive players. That place is in tournaments. I think the regular league should be considered a training area. Yes, it should be matched in such a way that players of most levels can be successful.

If HoTM is balanced like pure competitive tournaments, you chase away potential new players. Very few are masochistic enough to keep coming back after repeated stompings.

I believe it was Saint Augustine who said, “give me a child until he is 8 and I’ll give you an xtian for life.” What he meant was that the early experiences shape the rest. If a person comes into PvP and is at least moderately successful, they will likely stay and grow. If they are curb stomped, they will likely leave and not come back.

Good ideas thanks
+1
I study Augustine and don’t think that’s him.

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”

? Aristotle, The Philosophy of Aristotle

Thane.9421:

Hi, I’m Thane, team captain of Theory of Relativity [EMC], what I would consider a mid-level team that has been competitive in many tournaments. As a devoted PvP player with a team that has been together for over a year, and a devoted Guild Wars fan who has been playing since GW1, I’d like to make a few observations at this pivotal time with Colin Johanson leaving the picture.

PvP in an MMO is a funny thing. The most successful Esports games are typically 100% PvP – League, that sort of thing. They are accessible, arguably balanced, and have top level players who can get 20k+ viewers on twitch at times. These games are 100% committed to their PvP experience, something that just isn’t possible in an MMO.

That being said.

1. PvP and PvE need to have separate skill/trait balancing. I don’t know why exactly you’ve gone back and forth on resorting to this, and while I’m sure on paper a game where skills always operate the same way sounds wonderful, the simple fact is that there is not enough flexibility with builds and skills to have them be balanced in raids, in fractals, in WvW, against world bosses and in PvP. 5v5 point contention, 20 v 20 zerg fights, 50 v 1 enormous boss, you just aren’t going to make that work. Let me give an example: the nerf to alacrity took mesmer almost completely out of the meta for PvP. This brings me to the next point.

2a. When a class is forced completely out of the meta, it needs to be absolute top priority for your PvP team to bring it back in line with the other classes. In particular, now that Pro Leagues are limiting teams to no class stacking, the fact that there are two classes arguably out of the meta right now is just not acceptable. Not only does this disenfranchise some of your top players, but imagine the frustration of being a new player who is in love with and only really knows one class, and arriving in PvP to be greeted in every match with “great, a warrior, I might as well AFK.” Is this a lot to ask? Also, as a corollary:

3. The format for ranked and Pro leagues should be the same. If Pro Leagues eliminates class stacking, so should ranked play. This would honestly do a lot to assist balance, and even though obviously most teams will never get to the Pro Leagues, that’s the dream. You WANT us to want to grind ranked because we are striving to reach the pro level. Ranked team play should feel like the road to the Pro Leagues, even if it’s a road most will never reach the end of. Keep the two consistent if possible.

4. Don’t reinvent the wheel. We all love how committed Guild Wars 2 is to doing new and edgy things, but not so much that it justifies lack of balance. When you’ve got classes that aren’t playable in PvP, instead of picking some arbitrary new build you want to FORCE into the meta, why not look at the builds that have actually worked on that class in the past, and try and bring a couple of those in line with current builds. Builds work for a lot of reasons – one of the important things is that a given build can’t be outclassed at doing the exact same thing on a team by another build, or it just won’t see play (and the players who do play it will be given grief.) So instead of, say, for example, trying to buff rifle, a weapon that has never been taken seriously in PvP on warrior, why not take a look at good old longbow, a weapon that was a lynchpin of Hambow, Shoutbow, and GS/longbow, all of which were meta warrior builds in their time. When something isn’t working, sometimes you should look at when it was working.

5. Balance based on high level play, not low level play. As much as it might frustrate some new players to get shut down by the occasional ‘easy to play’ spike build, a healthy high level game is essential to the health of the game overall. Bad players are going to get wrecked by things that they shouldn’t, and some builds are just easier to play, so they come out stronger at low skill levels. Often times, these are going to be builds that can put out a high amount of pressure, because less skilled players aren’t proficient at kiting and dodging effectively. Nerfing based on these complaints results in bunk meta, and boring high level play, or classes being drummed out of the meta, like has happened with Dragon Hunter. It is also honestly not a favor to the low level players.

6. Get these PvE rewards that every Guild Wars 2 player feels entitled to out of our ranked PvP. The way to get more people invested in PvP isn’t to railroad PvE players into it! PvP needs NEW players that are interested BECAUSE OF PVP. Players who will log the hours to play the THOUSANDS OF GAMES it takes to actually become top players, or even mid tier players, honestly. Sure, PvP players want some swag, but what we don’t want is PvE players coming in to ‘get their dailies’ or players wanting MMR to somehow create an artificially even playing field where anyone can climb to Legendary if they just play a lot, because they want their shiny wings. No. Create parallel systems to get the same items/skins in PvE and PvP involving similar amounts of effort, so you aren’t forcing PvP people to grind PvE or PvE people to grind PvP, and you’d be doing your community a huge favor.

7. Season are neat, but the ladders and ranks need to be permanent. Refresh them at the start of a season, sure. But forcing everyone into unranked while the seasons are inactive is like cruel and unusual punishment. Not only does it make a mess of MMR, it forces us to play on maps that are utterly irrelevant to ranked players, and honestly turns the heart of the mist into a ghost town.

8. Put some stuff to do in Heart of the Mist. A jumping puzzle? Mini games? ANYTHING? As much as I love killing the same 3-4 npcs at a time thousands of times, actually no, no I don’t love spending that much of my time logged into GW2 just…. waiting. Addressing queue times is an excellent step here, but you all could definitely improve quality of life for PvP players by giving us a bit more to do in HotM.

9. Maybe give some love to hot joins, I don’t know. Create a reason that non-serious, less competitive players might actually WANT to do unranked or hot join play, instead of feeling like if they don’t do ranked they aren’t making progress. Maybe bring back Zaishen quests? Make arenas less expensive? Open up more options in arenas, rather than wasting time on Guild Hall pvp arenas, where you can’t use amulets?

10. Start working on a way to poll top tier players for input on balance. Whether you open a test server, send out surveys, monitor top level play, or a combination of all, it needs to happen. It’s painfully obvious that some of these balance decisions are made by people who don’t have a very deep grasp of PvP strategy, builds and team composition. You have a community where some people have dedicated their time to thousands on thousands of games… utilize that, it’s just ridiculous not to.

I’m sure there are many who will disagree with a lot of what I’ve said here, but at the end of the day, Anet: you need to decide who your audience is, and make a product that will appeal to them. Whether that is your current PvE players, or potential GW2 players who might be drawn in by a more balanced, competitive PvP game with a robust Pro League and top level play to entice them.

Please do everyone a favor and also post this on reddit.

Apparently that’s where the action is.

@OP

1. You seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking skill splits will magically solve everything balance issue; they won’t. The same devs doing balance now will just have to balance more skills. And many of the skills which are changed were too good in multiple formats to one degree or another and ended up being overnerfed. That’s not to say skill splits should be ignored, but they should be used sparingly.

2. Agree, but you have to consider the reason a profession or build is forced out. Right now, it’s a few OP builds forcing everything else out. Buffing builds which are no longer in the meta but were competitive pre-HoT just turns PvP into a mess of power creep.

3. Not sure why Proleague implemented this rule, but the anti-stacking rule is treating the symptom – a handful of OP builds – not the cause. Once balance is in a better state, build stacking won’t be an issue.

4. Agree about not reinventing the wheel. However, ANet should want to make more options viable. It just shouldn’t come at the cost of what is already acceptably balanced.

5. Disagree. You need to balance reasonably well for all skill levels. If low and mid tiers are dominated by brainless builds (e.g. turret engi), changes need to be made. Otherwise, the PvP playerbase evaporates. Top tier should be the focus for fine tuning, however.

6. Disagree to an extent. You need some way to attract players who otherwise wouldn’t play PvP. Plentiful rewards for long-term and skillful play also need to exist, though.

7. Agree about the downtime. The purpose of the one month wait was for balance to settle. But if nothing is done about awful balance at the end of that month (just before ranked play resumes), why bother waiting? Keep the gap between seasons to 1 or 2 weeks max. That’s enough to squash bugs and do some maintenance.

8. Agree. Mystic Forge please.

9. Not sure how often people use these anymore. But if there was any easy way to stop team swapping for wins or team stacking, it would help a lot. Maybe only allow players to join the losing side if team size is even.

10. Agree that better dialogue needs to happen surrounding balance. It seems that every three months, we get changes thrown at us, some of which makes little to no sense. Maybe give us a few weeks preview instead of a few days so that players can weigh in suggested changes? Also, acknowledging our complaints would help quell the constant anger.

A lot of my disagreement is because the OP is viewing PvP as only for PvPers. You can’t do that. A community which doesn’t grow and recruit new members will quickly wither and die. In order to keep an active, strong community, you need to embrace all skill levels and varieties (casual, hardcore, PvE, etc) of players.

Thane.9421:

1. PvP and PvE need to have separate skill/trait balancing. I don’t know why exactly you’ve gone back and forth on resorting to this, and while I’m sure on paper a game where skills always operate the same way sounds wonderful, the simple fact is that there is not enough flexibility with builds and skills to have them be balanced in raids, in fractals, in WvW, against world bosses and in PvP. 5v5 point contention, 20 v 20 zerg fights, 50 v 1 enormous boss, you just aren’t going to make that work. Let me give an example: the nerf to alacrity took mesmer almost completely out of the meta for PvP. This brings me to the next point.

Everyone always talk about this wanting this, but no one ever talks on how to do this.

Sorry it was Ignatius of Loyola and I misquoted slightly. Same meaning though. I apologize for the misquote.

All the points are accurate and complete. Thanks for writing this, I hope it grasps attention.

ps:

Please do everyone a favor and also post this on reddit.
Apparently that’s where the action is.

this would be a good idea

+1 very nice .. All would be a nice indeed

Love this post but there is one specific I’d personally like to include. If skill balance between pvp and pve is split (really hope it is) then in that split condi in pvp needs to go back to the way it was pre everything stacks. The game was much more balanced before then and you didn’t have tanky af builds stacking enough condi damage to kill you in 2 sec and being able to maintain that damage. The change will still allow for the degen style to be used but it won’t also have bursting capabilities. I’d also like to see chill damage toned down cause as it is right now I can easily hit 650 per sec chill damage which imo is kind of silly considering it has powerful alternate effects as well.

In pve the condis can stack as they do now so that every style of play is able to be used without elitism saying no condi allowed and such.

Exedore.6320:

2. Agree, but you have to consider the reason a profession or build is forced out. Right now, it’s a few OP builds forcing everything else out. Buffing builds which are no longer in the meta but were competitive pre-HoT just turns PvP into a mess of power creep.

Anet decides what they want to be in meta, let’s not forget certain classes continue to be meta after so many tweaks, how is that fair to other classes such as Mesmer that get nerfed to the ground after one appearance in meta, yet Ele/Engi continue to be immune to effects of buffs / nerfs? If those are the perfect template for classes, they should modify other classes to be the same level as those 2 classes.

To go further on my first point, separating PvE and PvP skills/traits obviously isn’t going to be the first choice when balancing something. Sometimes, something is just plain OP, and flat out needs a nerf, and that’s all well and good. But let me go to my alacrity example again: this was in need of such a severe nerf specifically mostly because of the effect it was having on raids. In PvP, chances are a mesmer would be lucky to effect 1-2 other people with their alacrity, because of the point control focus of the format.

I would argue that it is actually more complicated to try and balance a single set of skills for such a diverse set of criteria than it is to isolate out the problematic format with a given skill and give that format its own specific solution.

Also, given that there are separate development teams for different formats, I suspect this could simplify the balancing process at Anet. Instead of one team coming forward with a proposal for a balance change which then has to be reconciled with the big picture, each team can control the balance in their own formats. Less groupthink, more targeted team management of balance.

Lastly, the how is not really the question. Skills already were balanced this way in GW1, and some specific skills actually have been made different in PvP/PvE in GW2 in the past, so the coding is clearly not a problem. I suspect ‘the problem’ is a philosophy of wanting the game unified for a combination of aesthetic and organizational (internally to anet, re: approvals for changes and whatnot) reasons, along with perhaps a concern with making the game too complex for new players to approach. This last concern is silly though: those who are new to the game would hardly notice the balance shifts between skills that still too more or less similar things, and those players who are more advanced in a given format will be familiar enough with the game and their chosen format to understand the differences.

Also a further note on my point 2…

Anet really needs to look at the bigger picture. Yes, we do want people to come in to PvP from PvE. But if Anet actually wants to build a legit GW2 Esports scene that is more than, well…. backwater, then they need to create the kind of PvP environment that would bring new players to the game specifically for pvp.

And you know what turns off PvP players? Games where the balance is so bad that multiple classes are seen as unplayable. Arguably one of the strongest things about GW2 PvP is the flexibility of build design and team design, and keeping every class viable is the single most important thing Anet needs to do to build on that strength.

Don’t get me wrong, creating additional build diversity by bringing new builds into play is a great idea, but when a whole class is out of serious play, we can’t forget how many new players this can alienate, whether it’s new PvE players who can’t bring their favorite toon to PvP without being a burden, or entirely new GW2 players who look into the game and are put off by the lack of balance.

+1
Very well said

Well said, all good stuff. Can’t upvote enough.
+1

Well said, thank you. Here’s hoping anet reads posts.

Exedore.6320:

@OP

1. You seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking skill splits will magically solve everything balance issue; they won’t. The same devs doing balance now will just have to balance more skills. And many of the skills which are changed were too good in multiple formats to one degree or another and ended up being overnerfed. That’s not to say skill splits should be ignored, but they should be used sparingly.

2. Agree, but you have to consider the reason a profession or build is forced out. Right now, it’s a few OP builds forcing everything else out. Buffing builds which are no longer in the meta but were competitive pre-HoT just turns PvP into a mess of power creep.

3. Not sure why Proleague implemented this rule, but the anti-stacking rule is treating the symptom – a handful of OP builds – not the cause. Once balance is in a better state, build stacking won’t be an issue.

4. Agree about not reinventing the wheel. However, ANet should want to make more options viable. It just shouldn’t come at the cost of what is already acceptably balanced.

5. Disagree. You need to balance reasonably well for all skill levels. If low and mid tiers are dominated by brainless builds (e.g. turret engi), changes need to be made. Otherwise, the PvP playerbase evaporates. Top tier should be the focus for fine tuning, however.

6. Disagree to an extent. You need some way to attract players who otherwise wouldn’t play PvP. Plentiful rewards for long-term and skillful play also need to exist, though.

7. Agree about the downtime. The purpose of the one month wait was for balance to settle. But if nothing is done about awful balance at the end of that month (just before ranked play resumes), why bother waiting? Keep the gap between seasons to 1 or 2 weeks max. That’s enough to squash bugs and do some maintenance.

8. Agree. Mystic Forge please.

9. Not sure how often people use these anymore. But if there was any easy way to stop team swapping for wins or team stacking, it would help a lot. Maybe only allow players to join the losing side if team size is even.

10. Agree that better dialogue needs to happen surrounding balance. It seems that every three months, we get changes thrown at us, some of which makes little to no sense. Maybe give us a few weeks preview instead of a few days so that players can weigh in suggested changes? Also, acknowledging our complaints would help quell the constant anger.

A lot of my disagreement is because the OP is viewing PvP as only for PvPers. You can’t do that. A community which doesn’t grow and recruit new members will quickly wither and die. In order to keep an active, strong community, you need to embrace all skill levels and varieties (casual, hardcore, PvE, etc) of players.

This ^^^ … you took the words out of my mouth, your conclusion was a classic and the OP is a minority. If you talk to pro players such as java. You d get a complete 180 from what the OP is insinuating. I guess the OP just want to fit in.

You got my +1.

I would add this:

11. Rank queue need to show your skills, not the grinding of wins. We should raise in RANK if we wins versus a better team and lose in RANK when we lose versus baddest team. Bringing back old ranking system and putting the divisions to show where people stand in skills would help to merge the 6 divisions queue into 1 queue where SKILL matters. This would give competitive match from the lowest tier to the highest tier. MMR hell would not be an issue because your opponent MMR would be based on yours, so you got a chance to WIN and raise it.

Lots of good points from the OP, so +1 to most of that, but I’m going to nitpick on #4 and 5:

There need to be some decent low skill builds that do decently and I think that there should be a good number of PvE rewards in the game.

The reason is that the PvP community will always need a healthy dose of players, including casual primarily PvE-focused players who are lured in for rewards. The reason is that in reality, very few players are 100% PvE or PvP focused, even if many of us gravitate primarily to one of those directions. That crossover is crucial to helping prevent player burnout and to maintain a strong playerbase for the game overall.

I know it can be annoying to have ignorant players on your team who don’t care to much about being great PvPers, but that’s a problem for matchmaking. Group those players together as much as possible so that they can have an enjoyable experience and you’ll do the game overall a lot of good.

And those players will need some simple build options. Players will never become strong at learning basic map rotations and PvP strategy if they’re too focusing on trying to figure out if they need to be attacking in fire attunement or cleansing in water or bunkering down in earth, etc.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t ever want to see anything like turret engis become strong enough to pose a big threat again and I think that the top tier specs should be nuanced and reward skillful play. However, beginning players need to have some build options so that they aren’t overwhelmed by just playing their character and can learn from the overall PvP game without being at a tremendous disadvantage.

Exedore.6320:

@OP

1. You seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking skill splits will magically solve everything balance issue; they won’t. The same devs doing balance now will just have to balance more skills. And many of the skills which are changed were too good in multiple formats to one degree or another and ended up being overnerfed. That’s not to say skill splits should be ignored, but they should be used sparingly.

2. Agree, but you have to consider the reason a profession or build is forced out. Right now, it’s a few OP builds forcing everything else out. Buffing builds which are no longer in the meta but were competitive pre-HoT just turns PvP into a mess of power creep.

3. Not sure why Proleague implemented this rule, but the anti-stacking rule is treating the symptom – a handful of OP builds – not the cause. Once balance is in a better state, build stacking won’t be an issue.

4. Agree about not reinventing the wheel. However, ANet should want to make more options viable. It just shouldn’t come at the cost of what is already acceptably balanced.

5. Disagree. You need to balance reasonably well for all skill levels. If low and mid tiers are dominated by brainless builds (e.g. turret engi), changes need to be made. Otherwise, the PvP playerbase evaporates. Top tier should be the focus for fine tuning, however.

6. Disagree to an extent. You need some way to attract players who otherwise wouldn’t play PvP. Plentiful rewards for long-term and skillful play also need to exist, though.

7. Agree about the downtime. The purpose of the one month wait was for balance to settle. But if nothing is done about awful balance at the end of that month (just before ranked play resumes), why bother waiting? Keep the gap between seasons to 1 or 2 weeks max. That’s enough to squash bugs and do some maintenance.

8. Agree. Mystic Forge please.

9. Not sure how often people use these anymore. But if there was any easy way to stop team swapping for wins or team stacking, it would help a lot. Maybe only allow players to join the losing side if team size is even.

10. Agree that better dialogue needs to happen surrounding balance. It seems that every three months, we get changes thrown at us, some of which makes little to no sense. Maybe give us a few weeks preview instead of a few days so that players can weigh in suggested changes? Also, acknowledging our complaints would help quell the constant anger.

A lot of my disagreement is because the OP is viewing PvP as only for PvPers. You can’t do that. A community which doesn’t grow and recruit new members will quickly wither and die. In order to keep an active, strong community, you need to embrace all skill levels and varieties (casual, hardcore, PvE, etc) of players.

+1

StickerHappy.8052:

Thane.9421:

Hi, I’m Thane, team captain of Theory of Relativity [EMC], what I would consider a mid-level team that has been competitive in many tournaments. As a devoted PvP player with a team that has been together for over a year, and a devoted Guild Wars fan who has been playing since GW1, I’d like to make a few observations at this pivotal time with Colin Johanson leaving the picture.

PvP in an MMO is a funny thing. The most successful Esports games are typically 100% PvP – League, that sort of thing. They are accessible, arguably balanced, and have top level players who can get 20k+ viewers on twitch at times. These games are 100% committed to their PvP experience, something that just isn’t possible in an MMO.

That being said.

1. PvP and PvE need to have separate skill/trait balancing. I don’t know why exactly you’ve gone back and forth on resorting to this, and while I’m sure on paper a game where skills always operate the same way sounds wonderful, the simple fact is that there is not enough flexibility with builds and skills to have them be balanced in raids, in fractals, in WvW, against world bosses and in PvP. 5v5 point contention, 20 v 20 zerg fights, 50 v 1 enormous boss, you just aren’t going to make that work. Let me give an example: the nerf to alacrity took mesmer almost completely out of the meta for PvP. This brings me to the next point.

2a. When a class is forced completely out of the meta, it needs to be absolute top priority for your PvP team to bring it back in line with the other classes. In particular, now that Pro Leagues are limiting teams to no class stacking, the fact that there are two classes arguably out of the meta right now is just not acceptable. Not only does this disenfranchise some of your top players, but imagine the frustration of being a new player who is in love with and only really knows one class, and arriving in PvP to be greeted in every match with “great, a warrior, I might as well AFK.” Is this a lot to ask? Also, as a corollary:

3. The format for ranked and Pro leagues should be the same. If Pro Leagues eliminates class stacking, so should ranked play. This would honestly do a lot to assist balance, and even though obviously most teams will never get to the Pro Leagues, that’s the dream. You WANT us to want to grind ranked because we are striving to reach the pro level. Ranked team play should feel like the road to the Pro Leagues, even if it’s a road most will never reach the end of. Keep the two consistent if possible.

4. Don’t reinvent the wheel. We all love how committed Guild Wars 2 is to doing new and edgy things, but not so much that it justifies lack of balance. When you’ve got classes that aren’t playable in PvP, instead of picking some arbitrary new build you want to FORCE into the meta, why not look at the builds that have actually worked on that class in the past, and try and bring a couple of those in line with current builds. Builds work for a lot of reasons – one of the important things is that a given build can’t be outclassed at doing the exact same thing on a team by another build, or it just won’t see play (and the players who do play it will be given grief.) So instead of, say, for example, trying to buff rifle, a weapon that has never been taken seriously in PvP on warrior, why not take a look at good old longbow, a weapon that was a lynchpin of Hambow, Shoutbow, and GS/longbow, all of which were meta warrior builds in their time. When something isn’t working, sometimes you should look at when it was working.

5. Balance based on high level play, not low level play. As much as it might frustrate some new players to get shut down by the occasional ‘easy to play’ spike build, a healthy high level game is essential to the health of the game overall. Bad players are going to get wrecked by things that they shouldn’t, and some builds are just easier to play, so they come out stronger at low skill levels. Often times, these are going to be builds that can put out a high amount of pressure, because less skilled players aren’t proficient at kiting and dodging effectively. Nerfing based on these complaints results in bunk meta, and boring high level play, or classes being drummed out of the meta, like has happened with Dragon Hunter. It is also honestly not a favor to the low level players.

6. Get these PvE rewards that every Guild Wars 2 player feels entitled to out of our ranked PvP. The way to get more people invested in PvP isn’t to railroad PvE players into it! PvP needs NEW players that are interested BECAUSE OF PVP. Players who will log the hours to play the THOUSANDS OF GAMES it takes to actually become top players, or even mid tier players, honestly. Sure, PvP players want some swag, but what we don’t want is PvE players coming in to ‘get their dailies’ or players wanting MMR to somehow create an artificially even playing field where anyone can climb to Legendary if they just play a lot, because they want their shiny wings. No. Create parallel systems to get the same items/skins in PvE and PvP involving similar amounts of effort, so you aren’t forcing PvP people to grind PvE or PvE people to grind PvP, and you’d be doing your community a huge favor.

7. Season are neat, but the ladders and ranks need to be permanent. Refresh them at the start of a season, sure. But forcing everyone into unranked while the seasons are inactive is like cruel and unusual punishment. Not only does it make a mess of MMR, it forces us to play on maps that are utterly irrelevant to ranked players, and honestly turns the heart of the mist into a ghost town.

8. Put some stuff to do in Heart of the Mist. A jumping puzzle? Mini games? ANYTHING? As much as I love killing the same 3-4 npcs at a time thousands of times, actually no, no I don’t love spending that much of my time logged into GW2 just…. waiting. Addressing queue times is an excellent step here, but you all could definitely improve quality of life for PvP players by giving us a bit more to do in HotM.

9. Maybe give some love to hot joins, I don’t know. Create a reason that non-serious, less competitive players might actually WANT to do unranked or hot join play, instead of feeling like if they don’t do ranked they aren’t making progress. Maybe bring back Zaishen quests? Make arenas less expensive? Open up more options in arenas, rather than wasting time on Guild Hall pvp arenas, where you can’t use amulets?

10. Start working on a way to poll top tier players for input on balance. Whether you open a test server, send out surveys, monitor top level play, or a combination of all, it needs to happen. It’s painfully obvious that some of these balance decisions are made by people who don’t have a very deep grasp of PvP strategy, builds and team composition. You have a community where some people have dedicated their time to thousands on thousands of games… utilize that, it’s just ridiculous not to.

I’m sure there are many who will disagree with a lot of what I’ve said here, but at the end of the day, Anet: you need to decide who your audience is, and make a product that will appeal to them. Whether that is your current PvE players, or potential GW2 players who might be drawn in by a more balanced, competitive PvP game with a robust Pro League and top level play to entice them.

Please do everyone a favor and also post this on reddit.

Apparently that’s where the action is.

Yeah, sadly I think you’re correct. You might even get dev interaction there…