Guild Wars 2

We’ve seen this sentiment (thread title) pop up a lot, lately in reaction to the ESL announcement — that is, that ANet should balance the game not around top potential, but around the “average player.” What do you mean? What is an average player? Are you talking about people that stand in traps, random dodge, never disengage, lose to burn guards? Are you saying that the average player is a bad player? This may or may not be true, but there are a couple problems with the idea of balancing the game for them.

Let’s be honest, this is what a lot of the HoT changes were. Seven of the nine elite specs’ special skills are AoE, meaning they added some 40 abilities where you don’t even need to face the right way, to say nothing of profession mechanics. Add to this the ever shorter cooldowns, tons of cc, and most professions’ inherent survival, and it becomes clear that the point was to adjust the skill floor such that a player who mashes whatever button looks shiniest at the moment can feel like it’s contributing to the fight. This wasn’t a good design decision, and while it has not gone away, a lot of changes since the release of HoT have been moving away from it.

The bigger issue is that this theoretical “average player” who has such a hard time with everything is someone who simply isn’t paying attention to positioning, cooldowns, rotations, etc. The fact is you cannot balance a game around someone who doesn’t want to learn how it works. There is no way to set the numbers such that this player doesn’t fail the test. If you run back and forth across a Purging Flames and then burn to death, this isn’t the condition’s fault.

A lot of players — not just the pros — can handle the issues that appear in forum complaints. You have to put in the effort. Plenty of posts read like “buff red checkers because black checkers are op.”