Guild Wars 2

What I see from game balance is good ideas being tested in the wrong place.

ANet, if you are going watch production metrics to determine if your changes are going the way you expect them, then you should really consider gathering those metrics in a public test realm/server.

I get it, you’re not set up for that yet, and it’ll take effort/time to do this and come up with a proper process. That said, if your pro-league is going to be more than just a marketing tool, and a legit attempt at professional gaming, you can’t have balance flubs like the bunker meta that came out of HoT, and you can’t have flubs with your quarterly major balance patches either. If you want your pro pvp marketing effort to be taken well that is.

It’s been suggested many time before in these forums, on reddit, probably by people talking to you guys in person too. But I think the evidence has mounted up enough that you guys need a PTR for your balance changes.

Is it going to solve everything? No way, and players will need to understand that too. Will it give you a much greater opportunity to catch problematic outliers, you bet it will.

The main reason I bring up these points, is because you as a company are clearly demonstrating, that you have cool ideas you want to implement, but your current process leaves everyone including yourselves very unsure of whether changes are good for PvP or not. I think employees and managers alike within the company would agree with what I have put in the title (“Beta in Production”), if you objectivley step back and look at how the company as a whole has been handling combat balance.

Edit
Also, community, please leave a comment, even if you have nothing to add, if you support this to keep this visible.

The month between seasons is to test the changes, with a large sample of players which shows quality metrics. A PTS will be played by a very small amount of people, I would be surprised if queues even pop in a PTS and even then only during prime time. It just doesn’t make sense and isn’t cost effective to run up a PTS infrastructure for a tiny minority of people who could be bothered to test it.

Far better to just give it a month in Unranked and see how it goes. The only drama with this is that the ESL finals will use the new balance prior to it being tested, that could be problematic.

I think we misunderstand the goals of ANET. They seem to very much want casters second class and to be yearning for the old berserker meta that they claimed they wanted to change.

The changes I’m seeing remind me of the arcades of the 80’s where we could win if we pounded the buttons fast enough. All muscle memory and reaction speed rather than thought.

From where I sit, it seems as if ANET wants to recreate StreetFighter on an MMO scale.