Guild Wars 2

I’m definitely no pro, but that seems a little harsh for the pros. For the entire year they are familiarized with a certain build, then all of a sudden nerfs, new stat combos, and different runes/sigils all at once. It seems like such a short span of time to prepare for something so important. Not to mention if anything in real life comes up (as it does) then that is valuable time lost, which gives the opposition that much more of an advantage.

Am I creating something out of nothing here? Should the pros be given more time to prepare for Leagues? If not, why?

I think you are confused about where the majority of revenue comes from. The championship streams for this game get like 500 viewers. Very different than the thousands of viewers a single dota streamer gets just pubbing.

Pros earn their biggest reward(real world money) in tournaments. League is more for majority of PvPers.

The worrisome thing is not so much trying to deal with the changes but dealing with balance “mistakes”. One such example would be like the addition (or buff) of a celestial amulet, giving classes such as engineer and elementalist with their hybrid damage a vast advantage over other classes. Such a change would make something like celestial meta for an entire season and give other classes a severe disadvantage. Turns out, this is exactly what we’ve been subjected to for over a year.

Two weeks is plenty. LoL players get patches in middle of their regular season. They had 2 weeks to adapt to the new patches before the LoL Worlds Championships.

I don’t think this is a huge issue.

Absolute nonsense. Timing balance patches around the pro season still makes balance way too infrequent. Other competitive games have dedicated, full-time balance teams with no qualms about dropping multiple, meta-changing balance patches in the middle of a season.

Two weeks is plenty of time to adjust for anyone serious about the game. I would even add further that any concern for how pro players are affected by balance changes sets a bad precedent for how the developers make decisions and take in feedback. Players in the competitive scene already have the wrong kind of influence in balance decisions, and the developers rely way too much on player feedback and suggestions. It doesn’t seem like the developers who work on balance, with some outliers, closely follow the competitive scene enough, or have an in-depth understanding of how PvP is played at the highest level that is necessary to make informed, timely, and firm decisions about balance. Apart from some vague platitudes they’ve offered, the developers don’t seem to have a clear vision or direction for balancing the game. The approach to balance has consistently been reactive as opposed to proactive, as developers take simply too long to address glaring issues (like the dominance of D/D elementalist in conquest), and it feels like they’ve been mostly tugged along into action by a vocal chorus of player complaints (which I will emphasize again, should not be the bread and butter of how you make decisions).

And to be fair, a large part of these problems stem from the simple fact that there has been no dedicated and full-time balance team working at ArenaNet. It seems like we’ve only had developers who have been pulled away from other projects and duties and gathered together every 4-6 months to pump out a balance patch. Maybe the start of the pro season and leagues indicates an interest by ArenaNet to allocate the resources that PvP sorely needs. Maybe the addition of Stronghold will invite a fresh and active approach to balance. Ultimately, it remains to be seen.

While I agree that balance is too slow, at least ANET has committed to 4 “big” balance updates per year and “TBD” cleanup ones. That according to Colin J. Still too slow, but better than the 1 every 6 to 8 months we’ve been getting.

My hope is that it is 4 big patches and then they actually fix broken specs once discovered.