Guild Wars 2

There’s a lot of talk about splitting balance. Many others and I have been advocates for changing the amulet system in sPvP, and normalizing everything else, instead. I’d like to further delve into this and help other players understand why the decision to split balance between formats is a poor one.

Below is from the Game Design Director of Riot Games in the recent AMA regarding balancing between different formats and levels of play. While this thread is talking about balancing between different formats and not different levels, most of what is said is still applicable:

…it leads to a place where we have two versions [of champion] with different damage coefficients and maybe even different rules about how his [mechanics] work. On top of violating all of the four points I raised above, it also creates that many more opportunities to introduce bugs to the game.

Splitting balance more isn’t going to help with much. It’ll also make what’s regarded as an already-difficult-to-watch experience in the current sPvP format even more confusing when professions, builds, skills, and traits perform differently in different environments. You shouldn’t be making your own players confused, and should be trying to create as much consistency as possible to let pure spectators enjoy watching the game. We already see the effects of the stat divide in terms of raw profession capability between sPvP and PvE/WvW, with each having a drastically different approach to combat environments based on profession-capabilities alone. Riot’s stance on splitting balance between any audience is that it’s simply not a good idea to allow for the game to grow and flourish. It makes spectating more difficult and the game more confusing for the community, and it makes balancing efforts take more work and be more confusing for the developers, and be strictly reactive with tweaks and buffs/nerfs than letting cross-game decisions potentially affect the meta and strategies.

Further, it also inflicts the community with a lack of assistance between groups of players. When isolated, the community becomes more internalized and less willing to cross-game. People end up less friendly, and communities end up more isolationist. This isn’t healthy for the game or the community at large.

Finally, split balancing just creates more work and overhead. A really cool idea to solve a problem in one game mode or echelon of play simply might not apply to the other. This ends up hurting both groups in the end, for cool ideas have to get rejected just because of some obscure if not arbitrary difference between audiences.

To cut down on confusing systems and reduce overhead while simply just making the entire game more consistent, it’d be wise to evaluate revising the amulet system in sPvP to provide the same number of stat points available in PvE/WvW, and to allow for the inclusion of more stat subdivision in builds in sPvP through allowing for whole sets of armor/weapons/accessories with their own stat selection options, particularly if build presets are going to be further emphasized, as this reduces the time overhead between switching builds while also giving players more granularity over their builds (enabling more diversity) and subsequently opening up more options.

I agree with you, except that im sure when the devs said about splitting was in the sense of not changing how your skills perform, but instead change the coeficients of them. Understand it as a skill that before was doing 2 stacks of bleeding for 6 secs, now does 3 stacks of bleeding for 4 secs.

otetas.9675:

I agree with you, except that im sure when the devs said about splitting was in the sense of not changing how your skills perform, but instead change the coeficients of them. Understand it as a skill that before was doing 2 stacks of bleeding for 6 secs, now does 3 stacks of bleeding for 4 secs.

The problem is that you subtly changed the function of a skill. The second bleed skill is more bursty then the first one. An easier example would be for instance blood is power pve uses the old version but pvp uses different coefficients. They doubled the might stacks and halved the condition stacks. The pvp version can be classified as a strong support skill with minor damage while he pve version is strong damage with minor support. The case is a bit exagerated but if you do a lot of these small cases you suddenly getbig changes.