Guild Wars 2

What do you guys think of the issues posed by Jon? I agree with many of his points. I understand where he is coming from it is a difficult position. Arenanet is a great company, but sometimes all companies need some adjustments due to reality not meeting expectations.

JonPeters.5630:

Not sure who is deleting this post as I don’t really see anything wrong with it. I can’t and won’t respond to everything, but my guess is thakittens being deleted because of the discussion it is generating. The crux of the problem here is communication. You all want us to tell you exactly what we are working on, but we can’t do that without getting the opposite set of complaints which is that it takes too long or we promise something and then can’t deliver on it.

At the end of the day Xeph post is so easy to make (nothing against him, I understand where it comes from) because it takes the obvious common sense deficiencies with the game and just enumerates them. What it lacks are the two important aspects.

1) details. It is easy to say to fix all this stuff but the devil is in the details. There are lots of problems with how these details need to be addressed so saying “solve difficult situation X” is essentially like saying, “solve long distance manned space flight” to NASA.
2) implementation. Once we figure out how to solve a problem we have to allocate resources into how to solve it. GW2 is a huge game with a ton of systems that I don’t expect you to understand. Please just don’t dismiss the complexity and you will find yourself a lot less frustrated and/or burnt out when our a answer is that these things take time.

Early on after release we had to work to combat the issues that rose up from shipping an online game to millions of players. As those have settled down, you have seen us in PvE, WvW and PvP as well increase the pace of improvements. In the last 8 months we have seen Leaderboards, Matchmaking, Custom Arenas, Spectator mode, Solo Arena, and permanent finishers added to just to PvP.

I can’t promise what we will improve next other than to say that the people with the foresight to make this game that you do all love to some extent are doing everything they can to continue to improve it.

Thanks for reading and considering my words,

Jon

I don’t accept what he said as an excuse for the state of the game. Basically his post can be summed up by ‘things take longer than you may want’. Fine. OK. So you can’t work as quickly as we would like you to. What does that have to do with the constant incorrect decisions being made?

The slow pace of changes isn’t the primary reason people are quitting. People are quitting because they wait forever, and then the change is really bad. People would be willing to wait if they thought their patience would be rewarded, but after a year of disappointments, a lot of people are simply giving up hope that the next patch or the patch after that will actually change anything.

I had given my feedback in the thread…now disappointed.
~ Devs are capable of faster update frequencies relating to balance at least as shown at Dhuumfire pax change.
~ Weapon set issues take far too long to resolve relative to when Anets aware of them. P/P issues addressed by Peters himself and when the pistol change did little, nothing was seen for many months. S/D Tactical -> April change as another time gap. Dancing daggers > 3 ini change another huge gap. Quickness changes “felt” slow but in reality Anet actually did follow up on trying to improve those skills relatively fast compared to what they normally do. They didn’t get it where they wanted it at first either they had to go back at durations and consequences which is fine because they were at least actively changing it.

tl;dr. The game may be complicated and sure it may be difficult to prop in features in a time fashion we would like but “smaller” tweaks like the skills themself, the team is capable of doing with greater frequency even if the buffs and nerfs to those effects are small.

You know a change like skill changed 5%, then two weeks later, skill damage increased 3% shows to me that they’re actively working on something being better, but taking a cautious approach. Doing nothing or basically doing one chunk and then another month just feels slow, and it’s not effective to me.
If there is a bunch of things you can’t change (large feature release time) can at least do the “small” stuff.

dreztina.4820:

I don’t accept what he said as an excuse for the state of the game. Basically his post can be summed up by ‘things take longer than you may want’. Fine. OK. So you can’t work as quickly as we would like you to. What does that have to do with the constant incorrect decisions being made?

Many complaints about the game, especially lack of support for SPVP. We were promised so much during the game’s release, but after a year still feel much is lacking. Whining and complaining legitimately about features that we expect to be in the game. Just look at the cesspool of dissatisfaction in the SPVP forums. Would it be such a mess if the PVPer’s expectations weren’t set so high?

Imagine a publishing house marketing a novel as the next 1000 page classikittenerature, when the author is not a literary genius. The result is a bunch of dissatisfied readers. The author is either happily rolling in the cash, or he is distraught being unable to deliver genius writing.

What if the developers can only work so fast, and the marketing publishing department set the bar way too high, impossible to reach? Was the marketing of GW2 irresponsible to both the customers and the developers?

I’m not sure, if the title will save this thread. The moderator is on a rampage.

Here’s one thing:

If you want to have successful competitive PvP, you need to have staff dedicated to PvP balance. They need to be pretty good at PvP and be able to look through complaints to figure out which abilities to tweak. But also, have the insight into whether to react or wait for the community to adjust. Poor balance is what kills competitive PvP faster than anything else.

gwawer.9805:

Many complaints about the game, especially lack of support for SPVP. We were promised so much during the game’s release, but after a year still feel much is lacking. Whining and complaining legitimately about features that we expect to be in the game. Just look at the cesspool of dissatisfaction in the SPVP forums. Would it be such a mess if the PVPer’s expectations weren’t set so high?

Imagine a publishing house marketing a novel as the next 1000 page classikittenerature, when the author is not a literary genius. The result is a bunch of dissatisfied readers. The author is either happily rolling in the cash, or he is distraught being unable to deliver genius writing.

What if the developers can only work so fast, and the marketing publishing department set the bar way too high, impossible to reach? Was the marketing of GW2 irresponsible to both the customers and the developers?

That’s not the main point. The speed and rate which the features are being delivered are in most people’s opinion being to slow.. that’s true but also not the main point.

Its the features they’ve added, especially the balance changes in which they worked, are completely the opposite of what the community wanted and gave their faithful feedback to. This is the main point and there is no excuse for that to be honest.

I personally feel like the excuses for slow balance being all of the “translating” and animation issues that slow them by months are silly. If your process is that slow, please look into lean-process management (hire a 6-sigma expert or something if you need to) in order to cut that time down. While large balance changes will take a lot of work, sometimes they get their numbers way off (warr healing a bit too high, ele sustained damage way to low, condi durations too long, cooldowns too short), and those are things that should be adjusted on a bi-weekly basis. They probably already even have the analytical tools to see which utils/skills/classes are seeing play, and thus have the tools to guide minor adjustments on a short cycle. The single most frustrating thing is the lack of action as they “let the game settle” for so long and don’t respond to pressing issues. If people at least see that they are doing tweaks frequently to adjust OP classes and going in the right direction they will have confidence. When there is stagnation there is a loss of hope.

BlackBeard.2873:

They probably already even have the analytical tools to see which utils/skills/classes are seeing play, and thus have the tools to guide minor adjustments on a short cycle.

They almost assuredly do, and almost assuredly make use of them. Which makes forum perceptions of balance somewhat inferior, no?

This issue is simple.

It took two months of sifting through the dumbest meta ever for no reason at all. This isn’t even a PvE thing, no one in PvE gives a kitten about Spirit Rangers or S/D thieves or Necromancers or Stun Lock/Infinite Regen Warriors.

Whatever the hell is going on at the top, its at a total disconnect with the bottom.

Can we just, for like three months, go back to the GW1 launch methods? Small balance every week on Tuesday until the meta forms into something decent?

And get rid of all these RNG passives.

nvm.. ~15~ nvm..

Its simple to understand once you accept that any company will focus resources on the fastest way to generate revenue. For GW2 that is most certainly not pvp. As such I have lowered my expectations properly, to nil.

Mammoth.1975:

BlackBeard.2873:

They probably already even have the analytical tools to see which utils/skills/classes are seeing play, and thus have the tools to guide minor adjustments on a short cycle.

They almost assuredly do, and almost assuredly make use of them. Which makes forum perceptions of balance somewhat inferior, no?

I do not think that forum perception of balance is inferior b/c I play and watch streams and just see the same things OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Further, it is easy to see imbalance of skills when looking at lists of the “top 10 utilities.” (SYG really has a 30s CD and is used almost universally, yet has not been tweaked?) Further, the point was that adjustments are made on a VERY LONG cycle time, rather than gradually as they start to realize things are too strong. If they were making tweaks every week or two people wouldn’t be so upset because they would be able to see progress, or at least attempted progress.

I’m not saying they should react immediately as builds emerge and start to take over, but instead can flag skills 2 weeks after they are EVERYWHERE (spirits) and think about an adjustment (lower proc rate, CD starts on death, smaller aoe radius, lower health of spirits, etc.).

Vena.8436:

This issue is simple.

It took two months of sifting through the dumbest meta ever for no reason at all. This isn’t even a PvE thing, no one in PvE gives a kitten about Spirit Rangers or S/D thieves or Necromancers or Stun Lock/Infinite Regen Warriors.

Whatever the hell is going on at the top, its at a total disconnect with the bottom.

Can we just, for like three months, go back to the GW1 launch methods? Small balance every week on Tuesday until the meta forms into something decent?

And get rid of all these RNG passives.

So I only use guard and thief but here are my thoughts fighting against the classes:

1. Spirit rangers/Minion Necros: Not a concern at all. They are actually easy to fight against. Too many people are just too lazy to learn how.
2. S/D thieves: I think they are a good counter to boon classes. I’d like to see them steal even more boons but do less damage in the process. Make it a pure team support spec.
3. Necro: Their AOEs are out of control. Needs to be adjusted.
4. Stun warrior: This is just too strong right now. Needs to be adjusted. I get that warriors needed some help in PvP, but they were already the OP class in PvE and in WvW zergs.