Guild Wars 2

I saw this writeup on reddit of why SC2 is a failure, and felt like you could pretty much replace everywhere it says “SC2” with “GW2 PvP” and it would still be correct.

Highlights:

People, ESPECIALLY people in this community seem to fail to realize that a game’s competitive success lives or dies by its casual accessibility.

One of the Starcraft 2’s major problems is its inability to understand that its primary audience (the casual gamer) has been completely neglected.

Let’s look at Brood War for a second. Check out what you see as soon as you log in. The chat + friends list takes up almost 70% of the screen! If you want to play “Melee” games (kind of the equivalent to Laddering in SC2) you have to click the “Join” button on the right, and then filter for the melee games you wanted to play. Starcraft 2 has taken a relatively minor and extremely unpopular feature of Starcraft Brood War and made it the focal point of their game. Why in the **** would you design a game around the most unpopular feature of its predecessor?! This shows a clear and disgusting lack of understanding on Blizzard’s part and is entirely unacceptable for a company trying to design a competitive game.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like these; obviously the people in Blizzard who work in the positions they work in are there for a reason, so I assume they know more than me about these things. But this…oversight…I just don’t understand. Everyone who played Brood War played for the UMS games; the 2v2v2v2 BGHs; the 3v3 zero clut!111 nr 20 and 2v2v2v2 FMP!. When most people think of BW, they remember playing hundreds of games of Evolves or Bunker Wars or that **** Yugioh! or DBZ game.

WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THE FOCAL POINT OF SC2 A COMPETITIVE ASPECT WHEN 95% OF CASUAL GAMERS HAVE NO DESIRE TO COMPETE?!

Now, arguably GW2 is different since it has 3Wv which I guess was supposed to be PvP for the casual crowd (lol). The problem with this is that, from what I can see, all the casual/PvE players see GW2 PvP as a completely different game, and only ever go there for a free trip to LA. I’ve actually not heard one single person in GW2 refer to the PvP in a non-joking manner since about a month after launch (and every single one of my friends that got GW2 I met in one PvP game or another).

I don’t know, what do you guys think? I think cutting all the game modes except the 1 competitive one was pretty much a shot in the foot of GW2 PvP ever being competitive. I also think this 9 month old wishlist of competitive features is doing nothing to make GW2 PvP competitive.

I disagree with this post for a couple of reasons.

First off, it’s pretty clear that SC2 is not a failure. Last I heard lots of teams and sponsorships in South Korea are beginning to make the switch to SC2, and this the country where BW is a national sport. SC2 is consistently in the top watched streams on Twitch, second only to LoL. Even the small tournaments get a couple thousand viewers and there are many players who pull in at least 1k when they stream.

Second, the person who made that reddit post isn’t wrong – SC2 is designed for a competitive community. But then for some reason he concludes that this is a bad thing. It’s not inherently bad or good, it’s all about what the purpose of the game is. Remember that BW was designed for a casual community because there was no such thing as a competitive video game community when it released. SC2 didn’t need to attract casual players to create a competitive community because the competitive community already existed. The OP has this idea in his head of what SC2 is “supposed” to be and then finds that it isn’t actually that way so therefore the game itself must be wrong. This is a very strange way to approach things in my opinion. And it’s still possible to join custom games and make custom maps so I’m not sure what he’s complaining about.

Third, sPvP is a different game compared to the rest of GW2. If you have a set of rules that defines a game, then you change some of the rules, you have a different game. Imagine chess without knights, or LoL without Flash, or DotA/HoN without Black King Bar/Shrunken Head. They would be similar games, but at the same time very, very different. Such changes would affect overall strategy, hero picks/bans, and even the individuals styles of play of each player. Same thing with GW2 sPvP. You can’t get the all the stat combinations you can get in the rest of the game, which weakens certain builds when players attempt to bring them into sPvP. There’s also a certain focus on control points that doesn’t exist in the rest of the game, which leads to different playstyles. Thus, different games.

Fourth, I don’t understand the complaint that there’s only 1 competitive game mode in GW2. Many games, like WoW, CS, LoL, HoN, BW, SC2, War3, etc. etc. etc. have only 1 competitive game mode and no one complains about that.

Lastly, GW2 sPvP has been out for less than half a year. WoW has had 8 years to refine its competitive PvP and tweak its ranking and leaderboard aspects. GW2 will become the competitive game that everyone wants it to be, and it’s kind of frustrating that it isn’t here yet, but it will come in time. GW2 has done nothing that prevents it from ever being a competitive game, as you suggest.