Guild Wars 2

TLDR: What do YOU think we can do as a community of players and developers to better fascilitate communication, transparency, and future development to the betterment of sPvP?

This post is intendend to encourage a constructive, critical, and non-cynical discussion around a segment of Mike O’Brien’s recent post, “A Message from the Game Director”:

“This year we also took a different approach with PvP and WvW releases. In PvE, we make fresh new content with the goal of surprising and delighting you with our work, but in competitive modes, the community owns the game modes and chooses what we work on, and we definitely shouldn’t be surprising you with where we take those game modes. Instead our goal this year was to develop more incrementally, test with the community on the live side, and take feedback every step of the way.”

This statement confirms a few things that are clear in hindsight but may not have been from the beginning of HOT release:
A) The iterative design process for sPvP,
B) the utilization of the playerbase as a testing ground, and
C) the community determined direction of the gamemode.

The veracity of this statement and whether this approach is best for sPvP is fair game for discussion. Regardless, it behooves the community to take this as the future foundation to grow from. Helping this process to function is to our own benefit, and two-way commuication and transparency is paramount to its success.

With this in mind:
(1) what do you think about this statement and process,
(2) what do you think about the direction of sPvP and where it should go, and
(3) how do you think we can best fascilitate open, objective, and critical communication?

Though it is nice to have the process clarified, it misses the point by not including a mechanism by which the core of sPvP can be addressed: skills, balance, and build diversity.

Here is a portion of a statement from Reddit user Charrikayu responding to the claim “there’s actual communication [from ANET now]”:

“This is also a big problem with balance patches which are still summarily dropped on the playerbase without public testing, after which the devs retreat into silence even though people usually have issues. Again, most of these changes lack any kind of communication about design goals, long-term ideas, summary of how a class has been faring, general candid development talk about the game. If something isn’t answered in the AMA we’re pretty much left in the dark, albeit with general release schedules known to us. That’s better than pre-HoT but still not ideal. I very much enjoy the communication policy of developers like Riot who freely talk to players on reddit and post weekly “state of the game” and “quick dev thoughts” articles about things they’ve noticed, changes they have in mind, and ideas they’re testing."

The sPvP team cannot touch skills, balance, and build diversity. This is the heart and core of sPvP gameplay. New maps, new rewards, and new ways of competing are great, but that is not what the sPvP play experience is or is about.

In order for this process to work, dialogue and transparency needs to be opened with the skills and balance team with respect to sPvP. This can be done and fascilitated in a number of different ways to make sure it is clear and effective: enlist the help of mods to fascilitate discussion, or sPvP team members; create a mandatory response/discussion format for ease of reading; request build diversity exploration from the players; etc.

In the end, real success cannot be achieved until skills and balance are recognized as the heart of the sPvP experience.

The sPvP team has done a good job by comparison at staying in reasonable communication with the players. The sigil rework discussions that took place prior to implementation should be held up as the standard from which to work. Its okay to disagree with final product, but it takes this kind of transparency and communication to build trust and acceptance.

If the direction of sPvP is going to be community driven (within the constraints of what the sPvP team is capable of), then more open communication of thoughts and potential projects is needed. This includes what the developers themselves would LIKE to do! Plucking popular ideas from the community without in-depth discussion about actual implementation is a miss:

(1) Automated tournaments seem to have largely turned out fine, especially considering willingness on additional itteration as outlined by Mike O’Brien’s statement and forum discussion.

(2) On the other hand, I’m not sure many players would have supported spending time and effort into developing a 2v2 mode if they knew it could not be supported outside of custom arenas.

As for the players … less hyperbole and cynicsm directed at the players and developers, and more examples with logical support would probably be great. For the most part the community seems to do a good job of pointing out learn to play issues, identifying what is actually overperforming at what levels of play, though it could probably be done and received in a more professional manner.

It’s hard to not be a cynic when balance in general has been ridiculously poor for a while. In fact, i think the only semi-good " reset" where balance felt almost right was the specialisation patch just before HoT landed… which made the spec patch issues seem completely ridiculous in comparaison of the disaster that was post-HoT balance in general.

Then there’s the multiple non-stealth elephants in the room… like i dunno …

• Pve-damage-scaled,instant activation traps almost as big as the caps … still not pvp split? Because apparently there was some weirdness with doing pvp splits because technical reasons ?

• The invasion of the bots ( massively in silver) since participation-type rewards were implemented and the absolute radio silence regarding that issue.

• The whole stupid drama with the “Infamous pvp esports team” selling themselves for real money ( to play for others, and give them the titles and shinies by " henching" them for real money) in the first monthly tourny, getting discovered and essentially given a little bitty slap on the wrist because reasons?

• The time it takes to have ridiculous things adjusted. Remember invincible turrets ? How long did that era last ?

The more non-stealth elephants in the room there is, the more this feels like a circus. And that’s not what we’re here for.

Allarius.5670:

In the end, real success cannot be achieved until skills and balance are recognized as the heart of the sPvP experience.

I’ll take Warframe as an example. Because of the endlessly scaling nature of the game and power-creep weaponry, in the beginning PvP there was non-existent when 1 shot from an assault rifle-type weapon can take down all your shields and health. People made do with clan room duels that used underpowered weaponry and armor upgrades to attempt to “standardise” PvP.

After some years the devs over there finally separated out a team for PvP. They roll out updates along with the main PvE patches and tweak things actively.

They normalized all frames into light, medium and heavy with movement speed/health differences.

They introduced PvP-only versions of frame powers.

They disabled all PvE upgrades to put in trade-off cards that allow you to customize your PvP frame, covering weakness or emphasizing strengths.

They normalized all weaponry completely separate from PvE meta. Some of the crappiest starter weaponry in PvE were actually some of the most reliable weapons in PvP mode.

While the game is a lot more twitch and resembles GunZ, where player experience and skill is more important than what frame you choose, the point I wanted to make was that complete separation of PvP and PvE can be doable and fun.

What was done recently regarding sigils was a big step forward.