Guild Wars 2

This is intended to be mostly for developers, but feel free to comment nonetheless.

I’m finding it hard to envision what criteria goes into balance patches, not to mention matchmaking. I’ve been in matches and even taken screenshots, which I’m now too lazy to upload, where a much more balanced game could have been achieved if the same profession had been split, say a game with two warriors and two guards on red and two thiefs and two necros on blue. Seriously? That leads me to believe there is absolutely zero consideration for personal statistics (say something as simple as number of games played on that profession) when it comes to matchmaking either.

Let’s not kid ourselves: this is an MMO and, as such, balance will forever be elusive. There will always be classes that perform well against some and badly against others, and paper will whine that scissors needs a nerf while scissors will scream then how will I deal with rock? That’s not my point, my point is that there needs to be a fundamental criteria by which we judge professions, and this should apply to matchmaking as well as to balance patches.

In my mind, this is very simple: damage, burst, sustain, evasion. Those are the criteria. Right now, there are professions which rank very high on all four and others that are lucky to do OK in two. I won’t go into specifics because I don’t want to derail the topic, but the fact remains this isn’t considered at all in matchmaking and doesn’t seem to factor into balance patches either.

When it comes to matchmaking, by my rough calculations the “law of large numbers” doesn’t actually apply. With 9 slots on any given match and 9 possible professions to fill them, considering they are split in two… the possible variations are so large, I’d estimate the number of matches you’d have to play for luck to stop being a factor to be in the thousands.

I think we can all agree that one-sided games aren’t really fun for anyone and something could be done to improve that. Balance wise, enough said.

The non class stacking code is written you can see it on the wiki it is just disabled because it would hurt Queue times

Sorry to tell you man. You are completely wasting your time here like so many of us have in the past. The simple solution to everyone who is having a problem with that lack of quality competitive matches in GW2’s PvP mode. Go do like many other actual competitive PvP players and go play the games that “Dedicates and sell themselves” for only being PvP games and nothing else.

Only a handful of niche MMOs had competitive PvP in them in the past. GW2s is very very casual thus caters to the casual player. Either get ok with this, or if you need to compete find somewhere to compete like many others have. GW2’s Ranked PvP since HoT release has been nothing but social luck grind based placement.

It’s social because of the mechanics of it’s 3 point conquest format. YOU can only hold one point at a time therefor you NEED to have YOUR TEAM not just yourself be better then the other team, or you’ll lose no matter if or not you can 1v3 the other team and not give up a decap if you 4 team mates can’t suvive or decap and hold one other point.

Luck as in other seasons there was many many players in Legendary divison that didn’t belong and many good players who gave up after beating their heads against the wall in the lower division with bad team mates. So all one had to do at that point was to spamm all the matches till they hit their luck steak.

My conclusion to this is as follows. As long as ANet and with little is left of it’s actual PvP community, don’t allow for a competitive skill based MM or PvP game mode. GW2’s PvP has NO HOPE what so ever of ever becoming competitive. The competitive gamers will just enter and leave because the lack of a testament to their skills being weighted against others instead of the majority of their random teams skills.

This is my opinion after taking a step back from the GW2’s PvP scene and playing other dedicated PvP games that balance for competitive play and not causal play. Games where the prize pools are well over 1 million US Dollars. Games that don’t have to sell broken Elite Specs to make money. Games that Balance way more things and stuff then ANet bothers to ever 3 or 4 months every 2 weeks or less.

Once you figure this out as I have, you’ll learn to embrace GW2 for what it is and what is not. A amazing causal, social, grind, luck based MMO that has very little PvP support or a competitive scene. Thus is just the nature of Theme Park MMOs.

Now I wait for the White Knights and or the ANet Moderators to flame us and punish us, at least me hard. For writing nothing abusive and trying to help people like you understand some of the things.

Thank you for that reply Reaper. That is what I’ve come to expect from MMOs in general, I’m new to GWs and since they aim to be a competitive eSport I was hoping that would be different. Chances are many of the issues I brought up were brought up before. Simply seeing the number of threads created in one day does lead me to believe any and all constructive criticism will go unnoticed.

Truthfully, to balance a game properly and iron out all the kinks, you’d need true gamers as developers who become aware of the issues in the same way players do. Such a shame, it’d be so easy to improve it.

Blaque, don’t buy into PR lines. Class stacking prolonging queue times? I’m not even going there, simply asking for them to be distributed among the teams. If it’s an odd number OK, but I know no effort whatsoever was done to make this a reality. What’s more, it’s not even about “class stacking” itself although that is the most obvious example. You can get a very squishy team vs. a high sustain team, and since most everyone’s damage numbers are roughly equivalent by design, the high sustain team will win 80%+ of the time. Now that’s something which is measurable and the fact that nothing is done about that is solely based on neglect.

What I proposed was a system for quantifying a profession’s strength and weakness, because truthfully if you wanted perfect balance you could have everyone play the same profession and build but you can allow for more appealing diversity provided you don’t let one profession excel at everything and others wane. You can have different playstyles, different strengths and weaknesses, counters even (not hard counters, that’s frustrating and takes the fun out of the game), and still achieve something that roughly resembles balance. That is not the case.