Guild Wars 2

Having listened to the last Ready Up, I agree with your decision to separate feature patches from living story patches. New living story additions always draw players away from pvp, making the effects of new features and patches become impossible to discern for days, until after everyone who’s keen to try out the new pve content has done so and decided to go back to pvp.

In the same vein, I believe that balance patches should also be decoupled from feature patches. The next patch in particular will radically overhaul the game with the rebalancing of rune sets and the changes to sigils. This means that the effect of skill balances will be completely impossible to see, as the metagame will be in flux for days if not weeks simply while people figure out the new optimal rune and sigil combos for their existing builds, let alone figuring out new builds enabled by the changes.

Meanwhile the skill balancing you seem to have planned seems quite minor, mildly shaving the power of a few skils and traits. Such minor changes will be completely overwhelmed by the sigil changes, and it will be impossible to tell whether the patch will have improved profession balance or not!

Moreover, in the past week I’ve personally seen the pvp population crash (presumably the effect of Wintersday rewards for pvp going away and people having cashed out most of their glory – I’m sure your live tracking of the game will corroborate my completely subjective impressions), and the metagame sink back into its warrior/warrior/guardian/necro/thief rut. Everyone’s tired and bored of the current meta, and I don’t see why we should all wait until the major new features are complete for a minor skill balance patch to try and shake things up a bit. Bearing in mind the scale of the rune and sigil changes you have planned, the skill balances seem to be trivial by comparison: I’m sure they’re the easiest to implement and I’d be surprised if they’re not mostly complete already. I’m sure it would therefore be easy for you to to implement the balance patch at least a couple of weeks before the feature patch. From a skill balancing point of view, this would allow you to more easily be able to see the effect of those changes, before the more radical overhaul of the new runes and sigils comes in to upset the metagame, and it would also cause the entire pvp playerbase (who are overwhelmingly tired of the current meta) to thank you for any patch that has a chance of changing it!

I don’t think it matters honestly.

They have different teams working on different parts of the game.

They don’t really impact each other except perhaps from a support perspective, but I don’t know how ANet does support.

It’s likely they have devs that work on in critical areas whose time would be required by multiple teams. However this work also shouldn’t impact more than the team that the work is being done for unless there are a resource/time management issues. Which if this is the case then it’s still not an issue with having simultaneous releases it’s an issue with resources and time management.

I absolutely feel that slight metagame tweaks, like the ones announced for the next balancing patch, should be “decoupled” from any massive feature patch, and instead come at their own, and as soon as possible. The game only has to win by having a better meta as soon as possible.

Thanks Diogo, my point exactly.
@Shockwave, the fact that the skill balance team is separate from the feature team is exactly why balance patches COULD be decoupled from feature patches with little effect.

Bumping because after a few games I played just now the thought of waiting till March for a balance patch SICKENS ME TO THE STOMACH!

This should be an obvious change but i doubt the spvp team has any say in such things