Guild Wars 2

The lack of novelty in GW2 PvP is a much talked about subject. It occurs to me that the real cause here is that Arenanet has chosen to focus on creating, from whole cloth, new mechanics for each map (providing mechanics diversity) rather than doing what most competitive games do by providing new aesthetics and layouts to proven mechanics (layout variety).

Other games are able to push 5-20 maps per game type out quickly because each of those maps use identical mechanics and only change area, assets used and paths available. Players enjoy these games because the variety of layout keeps them from being bored by the same tactics played repeatedly over 5-7 maps (as we have in GW2).

With the introduction of the Stronghold game type Arenanet has spent over a year producing novel game mechanics. As a long term GW player (1 & 2) I unfortunately have little hope that the company spent over a year creating 5-10 maps for this new game type because experience points to a lack of focus on experience variety over novel mechanics.

Admittedly, there are plenty of games out there that have a single map and are wildly popular: Chess, Go, Monopoly. But all of those games provide more strategic options than the 3 PvP game types currently offered by GW2: Conquest (capture points), Stronghold (MOBA) and Courtyard (team deathmatch).

As other games with MOD communities are capable of cranking out packs of 10+ maps in a 1-2 year cycle, I expect Arenanet to meet or exceed that standard, which has been common since the 90’s in the competitive shooter genres. I’m sure other players would agree with this.

I don’t know why Arenanet seems to enjoy doing that for? Having unique mechanics is less important than having more maps with some adjustment. Better yet, why not use maps from gw1 as a template or inspiration instead of trying to be different for the sake of being different.

That has always been ARenanet main problem, they try too hard to be different and unique in everything when certain things don’t need to be unique. Then they spend years iterating just because they can.

With that said, mod communities can release a lot of maps because there are usually far more players than developers. Not only that but developers have to deal with resource limitation aka getting paid or technical help, while MODDing community simply copies and past using the software provided by the developers. So no.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_hall

scroll down to “Available guild hall types”. those were the GvG maps and while not all of them were top notch the maps back then were still good in mechanics and good in numbers.

i would not mind at all if they recycled them close to 1:1 for stronghold.

Using the GvG maps from GW1 as a foundation might be a place to start if Arenanet’s map designers were feeling lazy.

Having built a generally functional Unreal Ed map in a day, with 1-7 weeks of polish, using existing assets only, myself: I think the 300+ developers at Arenanet could find their way to building 5-10 PvP maps a year if they got out of the novel mechanics business and into layout variety.

What do you think?

you’re mistaken on that one, the pvp team is maybe 5 devs big and i don’t know how many 3d artists can assist them but if they don’t increase the size of the pvp dev team we will maybe get 1 new map per year; and balance patches every 4-6 months.

Jekkt.6045:

you’re mistaken on that one, the pvp team is maybe 5 devs big and i don’t know how many 3d artists can assist them but if they don’t increase the size of the pvp dev team we will maybe get 1 new map per year; and balance patches every 4-6 months.

Naturally, I was referring not to the PvP team size; but, the size of the company as a whole, which is over 300 employees. Even if they only had a single map designer for PvP, that designer should be able to crank out 4 maps a year using existing assets and play mechanics. What we’ve gotten over 3 years is Courtyard and the removal of water (mechanics based changes), not iterative layout variety for the conquest game mode via map creation.

If 5 people can’t create more than 1 map layout a year, they should be fired for incompetence. [Granted, novel mechanics can take years to perfect. I’m not asking for novel mechanics.]

What I suspect the PvP team has been doing is iterating on novel mechanics (on existing and new maps) rather than taking a quarter or two out of the year to give us some solid maps for the mechanics that already exist in the game.