Guild Wars 2

…short of anet propping it up with millions of dollars down the drain.

The game wasn’t designed for esports and was tacked onto a system trying to emulate WoW. The main design flaw is that there are too many skills.

For example as mesmer you can have 25 skills to press and the other classes have similar amounts.

So what’s wrong with this, you may ask? I can imagine some of you esports buffs scoffing already, but I have watched streams of even ESL players mindlessly spamming skills such as using rev sword 2 on another rev that was in hibernation for 2 seconds (and no he did not use phase traversal).

With this many skills there’s just no way you know the cooldown status of all 20+ of them nor are you making a conscious decision to use the appropriate skill at the appropriate time unless your opponent has the APM of a sloth. You are lying to yourself if you say you do.

Then there is also your dodge bar and you and your enemies’ condition and buff bars. You cannot know exactly when your opponent will be able to dodge because of all the random applications of vigor/weakness and sigils of energy, so you can only hit the skill randomly or hope they won’t double dodge.

And the same thing goes with random aegis/blind/cripple/distortion etc… There’s so much boon/condition spam that you cannot take the time to look at the status bar to see which of the 15 icons the size of an ant are applicable to your situation.

If you look at the 2 dominant esports game types, moba and fps, you will notice that they have very few skills yet are considered to have a high skill ceiling. Even gw1 only had 8. And even though WoW has so many players, its esports scene is relatively dead, yet that is what anet wanted to emulate with gw2.

This is the main reason why gw2 doesn’t have many Twitch viewers. It is a spam fest with people mashing a large amount of skills from different professions.

I do not see gw2 reducing the skillset any time soon as it conflicts with pve design of having a large amount of skills and they would have to re-balance everything.

If the sport is to have a lot of viewers it must be very simple so ppl have no trouble figuring whats going on. When you see a soccer goal you know exactly whats happened. GW2 is way too fast and complicated.

^^. I would of used that prize money on hiring more folks to work on something that GW2 has over other mmo which is combat fluidity and make PvP fun/balanced and large scale PvP fights in WvW.
Absolute shame its the game modes with the most neglect.

I think it could be esports and it could be fun to watch. Maybe the 5v5 Conquest format just doesn’t work for it. I am not certain why they settled on it.

I know there were 2v2 deathmatch tournaments they were pretty cool looking. It’s so much easier to pick out specific plays when the player numbers are lower.

If you consider guild wars 2 to have too many skills, you haven’t played guild wars 1.

Knight In Shining Armor.1708:

If you consider guild wars 2 to have too many skills, you haven’t played guild wars 1.

That really has nothing to do with what he/she is trying to discuss in relation to GW2 being an Esport.

However, the OP is correct as that is the reason why Mobas, FPS, and Hearthstone are all really popular with a lot of following and a MMO will never be. You can generally almost always derive when a big play is happening and/or follow along a match. GW2 looks like a mess to me sometimes during a team fight, and can be difficult to see when somebody made or is making a big play (i.e. I didn’t catch exactly what happened but that dude went down) – this coming from somebody with almost 7k games played and over 6k hours. I can only imagine what folks just stopping by on twitch to check out a pro league match must be thinking.

MOBAs have generally 4-6 abilities to follow, a FPS probably even less, and watching a card game couldn’t be more simple. No caster or viewer is going to be able to keep track of 20ish different skills per character to understand what someone is trying to do (before we even get into procs and other passive play).

I don’t play LoL but on the surface it’s pretty quick to pick up whats happening, to follow whats going on and even recognize good plays. Obviously their is a level of depth that you get into once you start playing/watching more but that doesn’t impact the ‘noob’ viewer.

The same can’t be said for GW2.

I can just imagine a dude coming to me and saying “hey i am a pro mmo esprtz player” i would burst out laughing. – said by some random person

See? This is limitation of MMO esports.

I would rather suggest just seperating gw2 pve and pvp, and make pvp be full esports game that has 0 pve or wvw content, with new game name other than the name of current “Guild wars”, and its new name should not sound like a joke or pve related.

well said. they waste much money to push this game into something what it will never be.

GW2 combat sometimes is just huge clusterkitten to watch.

I like to use “fustercluck”. Cuz it also refers to chickens.

I remember having to have WAAAAYYYY more keybinds/macros in WoW PvP compared to what you use in GW2.

Have things changed or something?

I think gw2 could be esport but if they didn’t neglect pvp so badly after launch where probably majority of pvpers quit. Then we just had fail experiment after fail on pvp system. I am not even going to start on terrible class balance right now. All that extra AOE spam and passives added with HoT made issue so much worse. I played this game for years and even i can’t tell most of the time wth is going on on stream due to visual clutter.

You need playerbase for esports, idk why they don’t understand it.

Cynz.9437:

I think gw2 could be esport but if they didn’t neglect pvp so badly after launch where probably majority of pvpers quit. Then we just had fail experiment after fail on pvp system. I am not even going to start on terrible class balance right now. All that extra AOE spam and passives added with HoT made issue so much worse. I played this game for years and even i can’t tell most of the time wth is going on on stream due to visual clutter.

You need playerbase for esports, idk why they don’t understand it.

Well what I am trying to say is that even if Anet didn’t neglect pvp, they would’ve failed anyway because gw2 design emulates WoW which appeals to pvers at the cost of esports.

You can see this by looking at WoW. Even though they are flush with cash and have a huge player base, their esports scene pales in comparison to games like Hearthstone, CS:GO and Dota. Simply having a huge player base is not enough to become an esport.

I want anet to succeed, but at this point I don’t think they will by throwing away so much money on something that is doomed to fail. They wanted WoW’s pve success and Gw1’s pvp success but in the end they will achieve neither one. These problems won’t be solved by simply throwing more money at tournaments and more balance patches.

true, the pvp is no fun at all

Am I the only one here that finds the whole node capture game mode boring to watch? Like I have seen a few exciting moments, but those like final style matches.
Anything before that doesn’t really catch my eye and are usually one sided anyways.

There are also hacks that apart from the big obvious teleport hacks also enable you to gain a subtle increase in movement speed so you’d fly below the radar of anyone who’d report you while having a perma-half swiftness edge :(

Hacks and exploits make such systems totally worthless.

Agemnon.4608:

There are also hacks that apart from the big obvious teleport hacks also enable you to gain a subtle increase in movement speed so you’d fly below the radar of anyone who’d report you while having a perma-half swiftness edge

Hacks and exploits make such systems totally worthless.

Seriously…. It’s pretty alarming the lack of effort they seem to put into this.

HipposWild.7185:

Agemnon.4608:

There are also hacks that apart from the big obvious teleport hacks also enable you to gain a subtle increase in movement speed so you’d fly below the radar of anyone who’d report you while having a perma-half swiftness edge

Hacks and exploits make such systems totally worthless.

Seriously…. It’s pretty alarming the lack of effort they seem to put into this.

Yeah and they have too many small subtle things too that a person can say is skill, or their build, that can actually be abused. Its sad that some players even recommend some of those “exploit/cheat” things to. Saying things like “Your PvP game will be better… Or you’ll be unstoppable in WvW…”

What happened to good honest fairness in playing?

I understand ANet not wanting to make a system closed so that everything is always the same rotation of skills or that everyone of say Warrior, isn’t locked into being a DPS class but that they can tank, and well in some classes case heal others. Yet all this, diversity leads to a system that its 1) hard to spot cheating especially when someone can claim that x trait gave them that boost… 2) hard to counter things that could be deemed as perma-stealth, perma-swiftness or near perma- anything…

I’m not saying get rid of what the game currently has, but if you want to call it “Esport” anything. You should take lessons from other games that actually have hackers that do x, y, z things a lot, like shooting through walls, and how to respond and react fast to such a thing, especially the high profile players of Esports…

BobbyT.7192:

Am I the only one here that finds the whole node capture game mode boring to watch? Like I have seen a few exciting moments, but those like final style matches.
Anything before that doesn’t really catch my eye and are usually one sided anyways.

No you’re not. Many do.

Almost every MMO I’ve played I kept track of cool downs in my head. This game is no different.

What makes a game esportz is an audience. This game doesn’t have one. We know, we get it. Everyone knows this game isn’t esports – even Arena.net. Make the PvP more like traditional MMO PvP I say.

Boring is still a huge step up from frustrating as hell so the viewers have it good compared to the players.

KayCee.4653:

BobbyT.7192:

Am I the only one here that finds the whole node capture game mode boring to watch? Like I have seen a few exciting moments, but those like final style matches.
Anything before that doesn’t really catch my eye and are usually one sided anyways.

No you’re not. Many do.

It’s not the concept of conquest itself that’s the issue, it’s the map design. If the capture points were around 3x their current size (Graveyard), fights wouldn’t look like unicorn vomit(holy crap Chrono). the points also have 0 interesting geographic features, just flat ground.

To compensate for the size, you would have to change how capturing works. One person should only slow the capture of a point, not outright deny it. This encourages the bunker meta even more. Whichever side has more players on point should gain capture progress (a la Battlefield).

This would make things way more comprehensible to spectators and make things more skillful overall.

Honestly, anet should have let the players themselves create the scene and then lent their support.
Trying to force e-sports down our throats has backfired and turned out a major disappointment that is the spvp today.

The funniest part is that despite that each players have spells out the wazzo, the only game mode where its the easiest for casters to go play by plays is WvW. You got one main force and smaller ones, its like football where you’re not looking at just once player but a bunch of players moving cohesively in formations.

The issue is that GW2 has an action combat system and a poor primary PvP game mode. Games like league and dota work with a few skills simply because they involve many more factors that adds layers upon layers of depth.

What does conquest give us? Circles. What else? Maybe lord, since the mini bosses aren’t usually worth the time on nifhel unless you’ve got the DPS to quickly down them and the mobility to get back to a point (rip thief).

BobbyT.7192:

Am I the only one here that finds the whole node capture game mode boring to watch? Like I have seen a few exciting moments, but those like final style matches.
Anything before that doesn’t really catch my eye and are usually one sided anyways.

+1