Dear Mr. O’Brien,
I am writing to request that you or one of your subordinates address the GW2 PvP community regarding the new League system, the core missing features and the balance problems. Point-by-point here are my grievances which I believe you will find are generally in-line with the pulse of the GW2 community as reflected by the overwhelming number of post in this forum and other on-line outlets such as the official GW2 reddit. My assumption Mr. O’Brien is that you are familiar enough with the sPvP side of the game to understand what is being critiqued here. If not please pass this along to the whoever has been delegated to head the sPvP design decisions.
How far you had come
Balance is key to e-sport. Balanced maps and balanced classes or in context to GW2 PvP at least a set of balanced meta builds that players can use and know they not only have the best gear available, but also the best play mechanics at their disposal. When that came together “build wars” went away and skill became the main driver.
It took three years for ArenaNet to get the balance in sPvP at a really good place. As the balance set it sPvP became very good. People learned to play certain roles and certain builds, tweaks had to happen on occasion but in the end a mesmer was still a mesmer, a Warrior still a warrior. sPvP grew and became popular in large part because of this balance.
The complete destruction of the sPvP meta
When Heart of Thorns launched the new Elite Specializations and new mods did not complement the existing sPvP meta. Instead it seems that it was carefully designed to completely destroy the current sPvP meta. The sPvP side of the game that so many players and developers labored over was completely destroyed the day HoT released. Within two weeks of HoT launch we had a new sPvP meta and it was clear if you want to play your favorite build you no longer can. What’s more, certain classes like Warrior were wiped altogether. To be competitive, Rangers are forced to play Druids (an entirely different mechanic), Guardians Dragon Hunters, etc.. It’s fair to say players had the game they loved taken from them. Why? The most likely answer seems so that your company could sell more product and that the integrity of the meta was sacrificed for that purpose.
We all understand GW2 relies on gem store purchases and expansion sells to keep things going. However, couldn’t their have been a better way to go about monetizing than to completely destroy the balance and play mechanics player had come to love? Will you please consider the impact of these decisions, look at the outcry here and elsewhere on the web over this and hold those accountable who made these decisions?
A broken queue systems
Perhaps the one thing most requested in the pvp forums is a solo queue separate from premade queue. You had such a system in GW1. Design decisions were made to not carry this over to GW2. A hybrid solo/team queue is horrible. It destroys the experience for solo queue players and it feeds free wins to premades. How can ranked play be taken seriously with this broken match making mechanic?
ELO and team sport philosophy vs solo sport philosophy
All ranked PvP play in GW2 (Conquest and now Stronghold) is team sport. It should be ranked as team sport but it never has! An individual players contribution to a match is always related to the team effort and team mechanics. It’s possible a mediocre player could be dealt a series of poor pugs and though “luck of the draw” could achieve top stats and top rank. In fact the top ranked player on the current PvP Leaderboards (Tibs.2783) posted calling the system “ridiculous”. If you want the metrics to qualify top ranked players to have meaning, they must be considered in relation to team composition and team rank. Think about what you have now? Imagine if Peyton Manning went and played with a high school team, healped them sweep an entire season and always got top stats. Would that be fair? With solo and premade queues being mixed without team rank consideration that is a reasonable analogy for what’s going on now. I good player can make strategy their time of day and figure out when to play to get the best outcomes. Also consider you’re using an logarithm for match making designed to pair up solo chess players. Why don’t you hire software engineering or task the ones you have now with building a more appropriate algorithm? Since meta builds give such an advantage the algorithm must take into account current meta builds and players use of such builds to properly balance teams along with their MMR.
Leagues- the new ant-casual merit badge system
So finally we get to Leagues. When you combine the queuing problems and balance problems the question becomes what are Leagues? The answer appears to be a context sensitive. To premade’s who only play ranked as premade (e.g. If you are The Abjured) the system seems great. You have achievements, division level awards. True PvP progression. You even get free rank in the form of lambs-to-the-slaughter PUG groups However if you solo queue the new League system offers you nothing except a coin toss. Heads: you get an open door to your slaughter, Tails: You get another Pug group (pray your pug is running current competitive builds). Mr. O’Brien do you think casual players are more likely to premade queue or solo queue? The League system should clearly be all about the team because again, Conquest and Stronghold are team sports and the team should have a place in the League. Just as solo and premade queues should exist, Pug and Premade Leagues should co-exist. It’s fine to give only the premade’s an opportunity to enter the Legendary division, but as it stands mixed it’s just a giant mess Since the focus continues to be on the individual the League rank is essentially just a merit badget to appear beside a characters name. It will make your premade players feel elite and more casual solo players feel worthless. It’s purpose seems to drive casual players to play non-stop and convert to non-casuals in order to gain prestige. This is your goal with this system is it not? Yet ArenaNet is on record as stating one of the goals of the League system was to make sPvP more inviting to casual players. I’m calling you out on that statement, because this system does the opposite. It discourages casual play.
The bottom line
In GW2 sPvP you have balance problems, you have queuing problems, you have not given players the tools needed (e.g. ability to replay past matches in client and spectate from multiple player angles post-game to improve), sPvP in GW2 is currenlty a broken mess. The best thing you could do right now is to give us a patch that suspends Leagues and removes rank until you can fix this. Give us all a mini Lama or think up something clever to compensate. It’s much better to take down a broken system than leave it active. You would stop the hemorrhaging.
Several of my friends who played have left the game. Several more curse the game every day and lately talk about leaving all the time. This angers me and it saddens me. This is not because of their lack of skill, it’s because of a broken system that offers little to them and forces them to play the game in an entirely different way.
As I finish this I am preparing to go play a structured PvP freemium model game by your biggest competitor in the MMO space. That game offers better balance, solo vs team queuing and the ability to watch past matches and learn from mistakes. There are no camera problems or other major issues. I hate to leave GW2 sPvP after spending so long in it and I am not completely gone yet. It’s just until these things are fixed I have strong incentive to join my friends in other games. With core features like solo vs premade queues and post-game multi-angle spectate absent it’s very difficult for some of us to understand why your company has put so much money into making GW2 sPvP an ESL e-sport. I think I can speak for the majority when I say we would have much rather you put that money into making the game a better experience for the other 98% percent of us.
From a long time Guild Wars franchise veteran, regardless what decision you make on the future of GW2 sPvP I want to say Thank you for the games you’ve given me. In GvG in GW1 and the past few years in GW2. You had something really great and for whatever reason it’s been destroyed, but it’s still in your power to rebuild it. To do queuing right and Leagues right.
Regards,
SamTheGuardian
In game: Samuel Masua | Fergus Masua | Issac Masua
(edited by SamTheGuardian.2938)