Guild Wars 2

I can definitely understand that somethings are going to be overpowered or over-tuned every once in a while. This happens in any game (see: release Xin Zhao for League of Legends, R8 for Counter-Strike).

My problem is that I don’t understand the logic inherent in Anet deciding that a balance patch before leagues wasn’t necessary.

My problem begins with the company considering the HoT release patch as a balance patch. Prior to this, we have only had beta weekends to test the elite specs (and even then, some elite specs had more opportunities to be tested than others). There was literally no time for anyone to optimize builds for any class.

So, it wasn’t until HoT was released to the live server that the masses were finally able to put elite specs to the test. The meta-game for PvP has just been shaken up like a snow globe. The snowflakes now need time to settle. Therefore, by my reasoning, the time between HoT-release and PvP leagues was the time to take a hard look at class balance and attempt adjustments to classes. A few weeks isn’t a lot of time to balance all these skills; I will concede that point, but with PvP leagues coming up it should have been high on the priority list. The meta was definitely settling before PvP leagues started, and every competent PvP player was starting to see the bunker meta form, especially from viewing pro tournaments.

That’s why I cannot accept that “we consider HoT to be the balance patch” to be an appropriate answer for the lack of bunker meta nerfs. While people are also complaining about the league system, I don’t think it’s necessary to throw fire at Anet…especially while leagues are in the first iteration. If I was the designer, I’d definitely want constructive criticism. But the reason behind the lack of pre-league balance patch does not make sense to me. Especially now that many new players are exposing themselves to PvP and dealing with an extremely tiring meta-game.

What do you guys think?

It’s been disclosed countless time on reddit already ; HoT release with the introduction of new specs is the balance patch for the first league season.

There is no need for further discussion, since this gives a good insight on how they view balance.

The logic? Everything’s working as intended obviously.

Exos.3472:

It’s been disclosed countless time on reddit already ; HoT release with the introduction of new specs is the balance patch for the first league season.

There is no need for further discussion, since this gives a good insight on how they view balance.

Well yeah but we can discusss conclusions from that, which is that balance does not have a high priority. Someone pointed out in another thread that HOT should not be considered a balance patch by any reasonable person because it introduced new features not balanced existing features.

By their own admission, they lack testing environment, thus new mechanics should never be considered “balance fixing”.

Work in programming for a state financial entity, the things the games industry in general and Anet in particular, get away with delivering broken or flat out unfinished (aka underwater revenant just to name 1) is unbelievable to me.

I imagine this conversation, yeah, we processed your mortgage but the system bugged out so you will need to make 3 payments a month. Dont worry, we will get it fixed, eventually.

I dont know if this comes down the quality of US programming over all or out sourced Korean programming or what, but this would never fly in my line of work.

Anet would heavily benefit from a test environment.

Let’s call it….Asuran Simulation Arena, an asura heys “Oh hey brave Mists Warrior, we’ve been tinking around with the ins and outs of the combat environment and want to get feedback on if our changes are helping, would you like to try and queue to see how it works? Here’s some notes on what we have changed if you’d like to see!”

Then the player IN GAME can see the changes they are testing and do a queue to test it out. Then at the end a little form can be filled in similar to what was used in the first BWEs where proper feedback can be given on their balance changes. To encourage players to try it, given them some ingame silver for their help, no rank change.

Then they have no excuse for making such utterly ridiculous changes.

A public test domain would be useful, but this problem could have been solved, or at the very least reduced, by thinking alone… in my opinion.

Apolo.5942:

By their own admission, they lack testing environment, thus new mechanics should never be considered “balance fixing”.

Work in programming for a state financial entity, the things the games industry in general and Anet in particular, get away with delivering broken or flat out unfinished (aka underwater revenant just to name 1) is unbelievable to me.

I imagine this conversation, yeah, we processed your mortgage but the system bugged out so you will need to make 3 payments a month. Dont worry, we will get it fixed, eventually.

I dont know if this comes down the quality of US programming over all or out sourced Korean programming or what, but this would never fly in my line of work.

Let’s cut anet a little bit of slack here…
1) It’s probably a lot harder to bug-check a complicated game of this sort than a mortgage system… there is an enormous list of things you need to check to bug fix this kind of game.
2) Having a bug in a game of this sort is no where near as catastrophic as a bug in a mortgage system, so of course it is better for the team to devote more resources to content production versus bug fixing in this kind of setting.

The biggest problem is that ANET doesn’t know the difference between a feature release and a balance patch. That is scary.

I was going to comment but then I tabbed ingame and forgot what I was going to say.

style.6173:

The biggest problem is that ANET doesn’t know the difference between a feature release and a balance patch. That is scary.

They do. They just didn’t do a balance patch before leagues (as promised) and retconned the feature release into a balance patch. Pretty sad.

Well balance is far more difficult than most give credit.

I mean druid just officially became meta recently. After all this time. It takes a long time for players and devs to figure stuff out. Whats truly OP and what is really just a knee jerk reaction.

Mightybird.6034:

Well balance is far more difficult than most give credit.

I mean druid just officially became meta recently. After all this time. It takes a long time for players and devs to figure stuff out. Whats truly OP and what is really just a knee jerk reaction.

Yet chronos and tempests are grouping together, farming Stronghold with 99% win rate (face palm)

Lord Kuru.3685:

style.6173:

The biggest problem is that ANET doesn’t know the difference between a feature release and a balance patch. That is scary.

They do. They just didn’t do a balance patch before leagues (as promised) and retconned the feature release into a balance patch. Pretty sad.

What balance?
C’mon they love unbalanced content, reason metas are not to be balanced but rotated when builds gets to much mainstream, it doest matter if is to much op or underpowered.
Even if it is a broken sigil or rune they dont fix, unless info get released by players, then when is a common stuff to use because it is broken they will fix it…