Guild Wars 2

^ Did we really expect anything different from Anet at this point? They implement “new world vs world” crap and I couldn’t log into it all day until they patched their new garbage. And not only that, they break another aspect of WvW in the process … such as no longer gaining endurance on killing guards / lords / supervisors when you’ve ranked up towards Guard Leech (8/10) which is now Applied Strength.

Frankly I’m a little sad to see some typical Anet trash post something on spvp forums like “OMG LOOK, I’M BACK! LOVE ME, GIVE ME ATTENTION” instead of something that’s actually worth reading and interesting to see let alone lacks any kind of useful information other than the already stated vague BS they vomit out continually.

0/10, please try harder. I don’t even know why I’m bothering with this game, much less the forums, considering this wanna be esports filth is free to play.

:|

Well guys…. this sucks, i miss grouch already; and for people who do not know. Allie will not be as active to the pvp community as much as grouch did. Grouch worked with actual players to make a well thought out plan for updates or tournaments, etc.. Allie will not, and she will not stream, and you will only be able to get “in touch” with her on the forums. Grouch actually played the game, with players like you and me… Allie, sadly, will not. Im also going by what Allie did last time she was in this position…. I did not even know she existed until she was on her hiatus and she came up in some random conversation. Hopefully she can breakout of her comfort zone and live up to what grouch as done.

It should be abundantly clear to Allie (and other devs) that on these forums they are going to see the same overwhelmingly negative response to Skyhammer staying in Solo Queue as ever before.

So I guess it’s pointless for them to trying to discuss with us about keeping that godawful map in rated PvP, they already know the response from the majority of forum-goers.

I’m deeply saddened that they are still “bouncing thoughts” regarding keeping Skyhammer in Solo Queue….all these months of endless noise and complaints about the map weren’t enough for them.
I’ll bet several of the responses from the “hidden metric” of players who want to KEEP skyhammer in Solo Queue are low-rank PvP’ers who don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t care. They just enjoy the fact their class/build can knock people into glass and off ledges, that’s all that matters to them.

All is truly vain. I wish I was saying that line in a happy/jolly manner but I’m not.

I’m going to open myself up to an onslaught here but Allie actually has done A LOT for this game and I’m 100% sure Grouch will say the same.

Allie was actually one of the biggest reasons Guild Wars 2 got to go to PAX and put in a hell of a lot of work to pull it off. That was just a small example of what she has done, she may not post as often or be a wordsmith on the forums but she puts in massive hours and a lot of heart into this community. Unfortunately she just can’t talk about all the work that goes on.

Now in saying that, I believe Grouch is an equal asset in the role as well, he is good friends with many PvPers and deeply connected to PvP community. The great thing about Grouch is you don’t have to pay him for this role for him to commit an extensive amount of time into it, he does it for love regardless and I’m certain we will continue to frequently see him.

To summarize, I think it’s great Allie is back as Grouch & Allie will make a hell of a team and increase resources in the PvP sector.

inb4 complaints about pax – at least it happened & it was a small stepping stone or ‘trial’ if you will.

+1 aussie

these forums are full of sad, sad people today though

Such a shame

Just remove Skyhammer from soloqueue already. Why does Arenanet take so long to improve simple solutions that will improve the game? Simple things like disabling right click to select target, account bound WvW ranks, etc.

Everyone and their dog knows that Skyhammer needs to be removed, just like the Dredge fractals need to be removed.

Arganthium.5638:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Just because we don’t have any plans to remove skyhammer from solo arena right now, doesn’t mean we aren’t kicking around ideas. I can’t get into much detail about it, but we’re trying to figure out how to measure it’s effect on solo arena.

I love how this is such a typical ANet response. Keep everything extremely vague in order to keep the concerned pacified while the devs do less for the game than the players do (just look at the Balance forum). There is absolutely no transparency here, and quite frankly, it’s extremely frustrating for those of us that are actually concerned about this game. The next balance patch, from what we’ve been hearing, is still ages away (though, not surprisingly, even a rough time frame is difficult to determine due to ANet’s policy of keeping everything as vague as possible), and people want to know that things are going to change for the better if they actually have to wait for that long. These types of responses are not helpful to the community whatsoever.

…Sorry if that sounded ominous.

When doesn’kitten

I wish I could +1 this post a thousand times, then do it again another thousand times. Anet needs to communicate better with its community, especially now when many new MMO’s and games in general are coming out. When game company’s are constantly vague, its a huge problem, and its not OK. VoTF wrote a few really good articles on this before they decided to leave Guild Wars, articles I think Anet needs to read and consider.

I will go ahead and link the articles, hopefully they wont get deleted.

http://www.votf.net/page/index.html/_/articles/farewell-guild-wars-2-r22

http://www.votf.net/page/index.html/_/articles/studio-interaction-a-pinch-of-salt-r25

DraganBlack.7864:

welcome back.
what happend to Grouch now that you took his job?

It is a conspiracy She is Grouch/Grouch is her. However, the real mastermind is a Level 81 Mesmer.

Welcome back, now tell the scripting team to give us an option to ban skyhammer from our map preferences so I can start pvping again

Kicast.1459:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

In case you haven’t seen some of the posts I’ve already made, I’m back! I’ll be covering PvP/WvW/Balance teams for community coordination.

That’s pretty much the short version. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here!

- Allie

Dear Allie,
Welcome back.
Now that you in charge of PvP/WvW/Balance teams, can you briefly give your view on current balance situation:
- what is ok
- what needs to be adjusted
for both wvw and pvp ?

Sometimes we feel lost with the changes you (Anet) provide.
Better visibility on your (Anet) understanding of the game would be helpfull to better understand what you call “where we want the game to be…”

Nothing to share Allie ?
Maybe it is a little to soon to have a good picture….the game has drastically changed for only 8 months….
Hope we will get your views soon.

wow, amazing.
welcome back, now pvp will for sure become epic.

grouch removed winter in the mists, i hope you do something great like this too at next patches!

WB, Allie.

I didn’t read the entire thread, just the beginning of the first page but I’m here to also say Skyhammer is a trash-tier map and we’d really appreciate it being addressed. No map should be focused around push/pull one shot mechanics, regardless of “positioning”.

It should be removed from solo que, at least, because it’s much nicer as an empty hotjoin map.

Welcome back Allie.

Now please, give people the choice. I don’t want to play skyhammer in soloQ.

I do NOT want to play skyhammer in soloQ. I pray everytime to not get a skyhammer pop. Every single time.

Give us a map veto system like in starcraft. Please. Do it. Just do it.

Listen…

Most people may not hate Skyhammer… BUT I don’t think there is anyone at all that wants it to stay if it causes SoloQ to become half as active as it could be without it.

Seriously – JUST REMOVE IT.

Don’t remove skyhammer. I would have no more use for my thief where I intentionally avoid killing people so I can rip them to their death from my kitten nal of stealth to make dodging futile. Eventually I’ll have 150 games won on a profession I barely know how to play averaging a score of 250+ per game.

The only part of this post that I’m trolling on is the first sentence.

I agree with a lot of the posters here, your return is little more than more of the same from the pvp ANet side of things.

Oh and Pax? yeah well done on pushing more advertising of your game, keep that e-sports dream alive whilst adding in more skyhammer and vague, never fulfilled promises of “big changes” and “new things”.

I was here from the get go and remember before release, all the promises you made and how they have almost all failed. Still got issues that were in the beta, still have problematic trait lines (made worse by failing to fix the current ones and adding new crap. Crap that then gets scaled back because it was also poorly thought out).

So yeah, glad your back into your job of fobbing us off. I do hope you come back to this thread when your called up for the “remember those games that had promise but ruined it with incompetent staff” that eurogamer will no doubt run in a few years time.

Remove leaderboard from soloq, it is not more than luck.
Thanks.

You back so wb. Now if finally some can listen to players will be great !
Now can we have a real pvp system in gw² ?
Can we fix the soloq lottery ?
Can we remove all thoose daily pvp who take too much time and make ppl frustrated (random 4v5, afker, …)

lot of friend already moved to another game and if nothing change i guess lot more will swap …

WB!

Ps can u check Your PM Inbox?

Thx

Allie Murdock.8152:

Nope, it’s much, much higher than that. We have real metrics to observe these things.

edit: I’ve talked to a lot of people personally, and the feelings are mixed. I’d say it’s actually close to 50/50. Regardless, talking to random people is not a real metric for the consensus of the playerbase.

Look, we know how passionate some of you feel about this, which is why I’m talking to you about it and why we’re looking into options for what we can do.

Out of curiosity, can you give us numbers about how many people still play pvp atm? Especially the distribution between hot join, yolo- and team queue would be interesting.

Also on a different note, can you pretty please with sugar on top give us a list of things you are currently and actively (!) working on improving? There’s a ton of things that have been left unadressed for ages, like the skyhammer farming, 4v5 issues, lack of gamemodes etc. and we get like no feedback at all. If you take a look at the Dev posts in this sub (if you find any at all among the last pages) you’ll see most of them being replies to trivial or even troll posts. The pvp community right now feels left alone and a short update like “hey guys, here’s a list of things we feel needs improvement and this is where we want to go” once a month wouldn’t hurt.

Regarding Skyhammer: Back in Beta after every quest, every few levels, every completed zone, a pop up appeared asking if we enjoyed it, was it to hard, etc. I feel something similar to that could be implemented into solo queue after the match has ended. Was the match balanced? Did you enjoy it? Do you like this map? Do you want to be able to dodge the cannon? etc.

Issue : Skyhammer

Solution : Personnal 1 map veto system.

Does this sound too out of this world ? There’re people that enjoy skyhammer, of course. But there’s also a LARGE number of people that do NOT want to play on this map. Instead of ignoring one or the other, just give us the choice..

just gimme 2v2 death match

Can we get condoms! I’m sick of having to go commando and catching so many conditions.

You could make the Gem store item.

I’ll believe the sPvP playerbase is “much much bigger” than 500ish people when I see the proof, because right now all empirical observation shows that 500 is a really solid estimate.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Unfortunately, one straw poll of 300ish people is a very, very small amount of our active player base. It may not seem like we have many people playing because we are all spread over different servers, but our active numbers are much, much bigger than that.

Couple of points:

1) There have been at least two polls on skyhammer, both with the same result.

2) I conducted the same poll for foefire, most said they liked the map- does that mean we actually do not like foefire? Or does it just mean nothing?

3) You guys ran a series of joint community development threads. It was an awesome idea. Nowhere near 350 different posters participated and yet you claimed to be able to glean what the community wanted from it. And yet when the community tries desperately through multiple polls, counter polls, endless stream of threads from different posters, posts from both new and experienced players begging you to remove it from soloqueue- suddenly you can’t decide what the community wants.

4) Aren’t all the NA servers connected when we play a match? People here are saying the population seems small because we look at the hotjoin servers and see 100-200 people in them-not because the HoM is empty.

well since skyhammer is such a great map and our 300++++++++++++++ pvp community loves it why dont u guys implement it in team q aswell, along with raid of crapicorn? i mean its not like u guys made bad choices in the past.

Wow, us pvpers can be so nasty and uncouth towards others. For shame. Constructive criticism isn’t an effective form of communication without the constructive part. We can do better…

MailMail.6534:

Wow, us pvpers can be so nasty and uncouth towards others. For shame. Constructive criticism isn’t an effective form of communication without the constructive part. We can do better…

You reap what you sow.

Pyriall.5027:

You reap what you sow.

That also applies to communities that are abusive towards community reps.

I wasn’t playing the last time Allie was responsible for this area, but regardless of the past, it seems to me that it would make more sense to encourage and work with her rather than act insultingly towards her.

Qaelyn.7612:

Pyriall.5027:

You reap what you sow.

That also applies to communities that are abusive towards community reps.

I wasn’t playing the last time Allie was responsible for this area, but regardless of the past, it seems to me that it would make more sense to encourage and work with her rather than act insultingly towards her.

You give them too much credit. All you need to do is read her responses in this thread about her internal unsubstantiated data. People have attempted to “work with them”. Fool me once…

Qaelyn.7612:

Pyriall.5027:

You reap what you sow.

That also applies to communities that are abusive towards community reps.

I wasn’t playing the last time Allie was responsible for this area, but regardless of the past, it seems to me that it would make more sense to encourage and work with her rather than act insultingly towards her.

As much as I would like to encourage her and work with her, there are still glaring issues which have been discussed by the community and not been acted upon reasonably.
Why is the broken matchmaking still not fixed ? Why is there Skyhammer in the SoloQ-rotation even though the spvp community posting here is mostly for its removal ? Why is there a skill like Berserker stance with full condition immunity for 8 seconds ? Why are there traits like Dhuumfire and Diamond Skin ? Why are there no more frequent balance patches ? Why is there still no balance from top to bottom ? Why is it still not heavily split ?
I have patience yes, but I cannot stand any hypocrisy in form of empty promises, misleading use of words or phrases, missing transparency and communication.
Okay, we have communication, but what is it being acted upon ? A joke of a nerf on healing signet which is by design flawed ? Invulnerability on Burning Speed ? The issue is still the dominance of easy to play and very rewarding builds (or more so certain skills and traits). These band-aid fixes won’t do.
This game won’t be heavily competitive and even less so esports if it isn’t understood that there has to be a high skill ceiling for competitive players and an easy access to PvP for casual players and viewers (unlocks in sPvP after their initial promise ?). How is this AoE-Spamfest in any way enjoyable nor skillful ? What about the plans from 2012 or early 2013 to tone down AoE ? (I cannot find that news post about “Looking Ahead”)
This is not about Allie though, she is just a Community Coordinator.
All in all, after not having listened to substantial concerns from players before, some experienced, some not so, they, the ones who made the final decisions, reap what they saw.

Edit: Okay, there is some more transparency with the Ready Ups, but they may still keep going with their ideas and plans which may not be the most optimal solution for sPvP. (See e.g. Healign Signet Nerf of 8 %)

I’m not disputing that there are issues, and that things that have been promised haven’t been followed through with. I just dispute that it’s either appropriate or constructive to vent on a new (or newly reassigned) community rep because of them.

Qaelyn.7612:

I’m not disputing that there are issues, and that things that have been promised haven’t been followed through with. I just dispute that it’s either appropriate or constructive to vent on a new (or newly reassigned) community rep because of them.

The thing is though, she may just be our only active middleman. (And the one brave enough to jump into the lion’s den)
So she will get a lot of feedback, whether positive or negative.
I admit she and others before her were sort of scapegoats, but this is partially due to the frustration (and I would say sort of despair out of passion about the game) from the playerbase. A playerbase which had to have a lot of patience and was still let-down as there was no clear and proper communication.
There is for example still no open test server even though I heard good stuff about Anet (from a recent Eurogamer article) (increasing general work force).
These Glicko-2 leaderboards would not have come through if they were tested by many beforehand. Neither certain balance changes.

This whole experience with GW2 mirrors my, as well as others, experience with Trion and Rift. Low staffing, slow balancing, continuously not listening to the playerbase, and followed with the “WHY YOU GUYS NO PLAY NOMOAR?”

Pyriall.5027:

This whole experience with GW2 mirrors my, as well as others, experience with Trion and Rift. Low staffing, slow balancing, continuously not listening to the playerbase, and followed with the “WHY YOU GUYS NO PLAY NOMOAR?”

I do not know if there is any understuffing but Click Here.
For more information about weird or non-optimal decisions Click Here.

In the first link, as part of the answer to the first question:

‘As for dwindling investment, it appears to be a myth: ArenaNet had a whopping 300 people when Guild Wars 2 launched, and now… now there are 350 and counting – ArenaNet is hiring.’

In the second link, there are some very interesting reviews which can further explain the situation we are in.

Sari.9836:

Pyriall.5027:

This whole experience with GW2 mirrors my, as well as others, experience with Trion and Rift. Low staffing, slow balancing, continuously not listening to the playerbase, and followed with the “WHY YOU GUYS NO PLAY NOMOAR?”

I do not know if there is any understuffing but Click Here.
For more information about weird or non-optimal decisionsClick Here.

In the first link, as part of the answer to the first question:

‘As for dwindling investment, it appears to be a myth: ArenaNet had a whopping 300 people when Guild Wars 2 launched, and now… now there are 350 and counting – ArenaNet is hiring.’

The biggest issue in the latter link is:

‘Experimentation with release cadence/style/type/team sizes and configurations, etc. Since Guild Wars 2 is subscription-free and relies on MTX, there’s been a lot experimenting to find out what model of content works best for this. So we’ve shifted gears so many times I’ve lost count. This may be a non-issue within the next couple months or year though.’
Why are we not being listened to instead since we are the customers ?

The pvp pool is understaffed. Have you viewed the pvp map creation power point? When they discuss “CANNON”, they show some images of the “entire” pvp staff (there was 5 or 6 people).

Pyriall.5027:

The pvp pool is understaffed. Have you viewed the pvp map creation power point? When they discuss “CANNON”, they show some images of the “entire” pvp staff (there was 5 or 6 people).

Sadly not that part, I watched the map’s images though.
If this is true, it is really sad. For (competitive) players and these 5-6 developers too.

Sari.9836:

Pyriall.5027:

The pvp pool is understaffed. Have you viewed the pvp map creation power point? When they discuss “CANNON”, they show some images of the “entire” pvp staff (there was 5 or 6 people).

Sadly not that part, I watched the map’s images though.
If this is true, it is really sad. For (competitive) players and these 5-6 developers too.

The very first slide, “Initial Meeting”. “We kind of start off with getting the whole pvp team together…”, Six people in the room.

Pyriall.5027:

Sari.9836:

Pyriall.5027:

The pvp pool is understaffed. Have you viewed the pvp map creation power point? When they discuss “CANNON”, they show some images of the “entire” pvp staff (there was 5 or 6 people).

Sadly not that part, I watched the map’s images though.
If this is true, it is really sad. For (competitive) players and these 5-6 developers too.

The very first slide, “Initial Meeting”. “We kind of start off with getting the whole pvp team together…”, Six people in the room.

I saw it earlier, thank you. It doesn’t look good.
I am not sure how effective 5-6 people may work on the issues and solutions.
Even less so if feedback from experienced players (of whom some quit last year already) may further be neglected.

Wow nice u are back, gj!
Pvp in gw2 is still so bad like one year ago.

I have a suggestion for Allie:

Play 100 skyhammer matches in Solo Q, ask in Map Chat : “Hey this map is great isn’kitten” Count the # of pros vs cons. If after 100 Skyhammer games in a row you’re not already convinced that this is the worst map that could’ve ever been designed for competitive play, I’m sure the % of players asked will.

Good to have you back Allie!

Allie started posting 6 days ago
gf left me coz of ladderboard was locked 6 days ago

Is all vain?

Hi allie! Can you telL your boss or what ever to nerf the overpowered warriors in pvp! TY!

Amstel Steel.2058:

Allie started posting 6 days ago
gf left me coz of ladderboard was locked 6 days ago

Is all vain?

This thread should’ve been stickied. What the hell !!!

Eurantien.4632:

Regarding Skyhammer: Back in Beta after every quest, every few levels, every completed zone, a pop up appeared asking if we enjoyed it, was it to hard, etc. I feel something similar to that could be implemented into solo queue after the match has ended. Was the match balanced? Did you enjoy it? Do you like this map? Do you want to be able to dodge the cannon? etc.

You cannot even report leavers. If pvp was a priority they would implement stff like that but it isn’t. Main objectives for pvp devs are:

• fix the very basic stuff that break balance/the game
• do not communicate any major info to the players because you might (most likely) not be able to keep those promises
• tell people how it is a priority and how it will become soooo good while actually working with a very small team on it and if you really want to enjoy esports you should honestly look for another game

All in all I not only feel disappointed by this “patch every 4 months” policy considering the terrible state of pvp in many aspects … I also feel being lied to and like they try to make me chase the carrot on a stick for too long while never giving it to me (because they simply cant with the lack of resources). I wish I didn’t invest so much time into gw2 and especially its pvp part.

Just to confirm; I have decided to take the same scientific approach that Allie has and have spoken to A LOT of people as well. The majority of those “A LOT” of people said to remove Skyhammer from ranked solo matches.

Oh boy…..Guess that means i am quitting again.

Welcome back! You were missed!

Allie Murdock.8152:

… but our active numbers are much, much bigger than that.

care to share the active numbers?

very curious….