Guild Wars 2

Anet gave us the rationale behind some changes instead of just showing them.

It not only creates a feeling that they don’t know a thing about their game, but also leads to many unnecessary negative reaction.

They really need to put more effort into explaining why some things are being changed the way they are instead of just presenting these changes without any context. Maybe it’s because we don’t know something, maybe we don’t see the full picture?

In Guild Wars 1 they would always give short dev notes to balance changes that usually put things into perspective. I believe that some info on every profession regarding what the aim of the changes was and how the devs think it is going to play out would come a long way in clarifying things.

What I’m saying is I want to hear a dev come and say: we tested it, we found it too strong/weak and decided to change that and we believe that the course of action we took will open this and that role/gameplay in PvE/PvP.

Is this too much to ask after having waited for months on end?

All is vain.

I’m having deja vu here.
Pretty sure there used to be tons of posts like those ~2 years ago. And we actually got a decent post explaining the changes…. once.

leman.7682:

In Guild Wars 1 they would always give short dev notes to balance changes that usually put things into perspective. I believe that some info on every profession regarding what the aim of the changes was and how the devs think it is going to play out would come a long way in clarifying things.

for Jon Snow’s here is an example:
Second Wind reduced casting time to 1 second; reduced Exhaustion to 5; changed functionality to: “You gain 1 Energy and 5 Health for each point of Energy restricted by Exhaustion. You lose all enchantments.”
Second Wind is a skill that has a unique interaction with the Exhaustion mechanic. While it doesn’t see a lot of use it can be fairly powerful under the right conditions. We’ve lowered the casting time and Exhaustion caused by this skill in order to improve its use. Additionally, it now heals the caster to provide some bar compression. Testing revealed that these changes could potentially bring back certain undesirable smite builds to PvP, so we’ve added a clause that removes all enchantments to prevent this from happening. Because the skill provides both Health and Energy now, we don’t feel this will negatively impact most builds.

i’d like to see the same things… but times change… games change… habits change… sometime in the wrong direction.

Umm…they kinda did. That’s what the Ready Up was.

Did they give you the rationale on absolutely everything? Probably not…but they spent over 2 hours just scratching the surface of 4 professions, so just bear in mind that time where they’re trying to calm the neverending uproar on the forums is time that they’re not balancing/coding/working/etc.

Oh and supposedly, they covered the other professions even after the twitch died and that vid will be up later.

Dahkeus.8243:

Umm…they kinda did. That’s what the Ready Up was.

Did they give you the rationale on absolutely everything? Probably not…but they spent over 2 hours just scratching the surface of 4 professions, so just bear in mind that time where they’re trying to calm the neverending uproar on the forums is time that they’re not balancing/coding/working/etc.

Oh and supposedly, they covered the other professions even after the twitch died and that vid will be up later.

What? They spent like 10 minutes on ele. They even talked longer about the condition changes.

No celestial nerf either. Kind of hope it isn’t nerfed. Necro could probably make a decent celestial build now blood magic semi ok.

Ready Up isn’t the best venue for that stuff. It’s during the day, and when they do these changes, it’s hours long. Very few people are going to watch hours of the video after the fact when they can just read the notes in 15-30 minutes at their own pace.

Another thing that would help foster communication is for a developer to post once every month or two on what they think are the issues and what they’re looking at doing for the next content update. Some examples would be: “We feel that cele rifle engi is too strong, but other engi builds seem too weak. We’re looking further into what we can adjust” and “Our next PvP system priority is <blank>”.

leman.7682:

What I’m saying is I want to hear a dev come and say: we tested it, we found it too strong/weak and decided to change that and we believe that the course of action we took will open this and that role/gameplay in PvE/PvP.

This is not something Arenanet does regularly, and by that I mean test their content before releasing it, so I would not get my hopes up. And even if they did, they would surely screw it up anyway. They are simply incompetent at what they do, especially PvP related.

I totally understand you though. It would be great if they actually did such a thing. But their ability to communicate changes let alone have any actual good ideas doesn’t exist.