Guild Wars 2

Ever since ArenaNet has teamed up with eSports organizer ESL to form a pro league for the game in late 2015, how would you rate ArenaNet’s success in this market?

http://www.strawpoll.me/10175949

Please back up your choice with a brief reason: Why you like it or what you don’t like about it. If you were to help ArenaNet achieve “E-Sports” acclaim, what would you suggest them to do?

I voted bad: Poor balance, no build diversity, no core specs in the ESL’s, low viewership.

I want GW2 esports to be the real deal, but it never will be as long as there continues to be no dedicated PvP balance team.

:(

Abysmal. It’s awkward to follow for new viewers, the build diversity is non-existent. Population is tiny so nobody watches it.

If ArenaNet want to achieve E-sports acclaim, I would suggest creating a new PvP only game just happens to be set in the guild wars universe. If they don’t want to do that then they need to separate PvP and PvE balancing and much more regular balance passes.

Im curious, what do other eSports get for viewership?
also, there is not really build diversity, but there was class diversity ..a lot. from what I’ve seen, no matter which game you play, there is always a “best” build.

Overall, it is a lot better than it use to be and is on the right track.

Anet banned polls but ima vote anyway because I support poll posting.

Hurry and vote before the devs stop it.

As much as I (used to) like the game; it never has been and it never will.

BAD:

-The streaming quality is really BAD!
> BAD camera work (too much flying around, cant follow a fight decent)
> BAD stream visual quality, its dark and too much blurr
> BAD sounds flying around from the game: Did you see that! etc etc..

If this thread is banned make a new thread reporting the results for us to comment on.

trash

Zelulose.8695:

If this thread is banned make a new thread reporting the results for us to comment on.

Why would they lock this thread when it’s providing constructive criticism for improvements? To lock this thread would be doing arenanet a disfavor by censoring valuable feedback.

@Maelstorm: Why?

TheBravery.9615:

Zelulose.8695:

If this thread is banned make a new thread reporting the results for us to comment on.

Why would they lock this thread when it’s providing constructive criticism for improvements? To lock this thread would be doing arenanet a disfavor by censoring valuable feedback.

@Maelstorm: Why?

Because that’s what they do…shhhhhh they are coming!

Gw2 should have never went the route of E Sports
that’s my 2 cents

I voted abysmal:

-op elite specs, when they said that elites are suppose to be on par with the core ones, that they are suppose to just allow classes to have different play styles
-terible balancing of classes: having 2 classes unplayable in the dumpster tier for 6 months only to buff them to must play unkilable status and nerf the previous 2 must pick classes in to the trash for the following 6 months is not balance, It is a stupid and terrible practice that needs to stop. There needs to be a deticated balance team that has only 1 job.
-no build diversity, you see the same 4 classes over and over again running the exact same build
-pore spectator infrastructure, no free camera and a metric kittenton of particle clutter making it hard to see wtf is going on. This last flaw extends from spectating to actual gameplay.
-pore map diversity & simplification of mechanics, after 3 years we still have only 4 maps and they removed the ferocity channel from temple for reasons? I put this as a negative as we do not know when spirit watch and sky hammer are going to be added to the ranked rotation and even if they do they are technically not new maps

I dont know but:
If you have to forbid class stacking because everybody would do it if you didnt…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If your top streamer leaves the game on behalf of the reason that it is not competitive enough to make people want to improve themselves…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If your esl players troll around, play without ts or choose a random comp from a website…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If you hardly get any viewers, the main incentive for ‘pros’ is the money and 90% of the playerbase could theoretically farm the highest possible rank…well, you know.

I dont think gw2 could not become a good esl game.
Its unique and has a very interesting and fun fighting system with a lot of potential.
However they need to take a serious look on the game itself before they can consider pushing esports AMN.
A good sport is wanted, not forced.

TheBravery.9615:

Zelulose.8695:

If this thread is banned make a new thread reporting the results for us to comment on.

Why would they lock this thread when it’s providing constructive criticism for improvements? To lock this thread would be doing arenanet a disfavor by censoring valuable feedback.

@Maelstorm: Why?

In the past I have opened polls on various things the trading post and balance changes and in each case they were removed with the moderator comment that their policies are against polls in the forums. But you can report a polls results without hurting their policies as it is not a poll technically although they might remove it as “harmful to the community” My suggestion to you was a back up in the case they remove this thread. (I note these things because I doubt the moderators will be able to handle seeing the truth.)

I voted bad. No differentiation if there are no big patches/updates/expansions, poor amount of viewers, and zero renown in the world of Esports.

I voted excellent. I absolutely love the esports events, far more than anything that has been released in game and every single week the pro league is on I get as excited to see it as I did for the release of HoT. I really enjoy it that much. There is quite literally nothing that Anet could put in game that I would find nearly as enjoyable as watching the pro league, that is not an exaggeration at all. I find it unbelievable that most people don’t love the esports as much as I do because I seriously do not see what there is to dislike about it.

I see that people mentioned bad class balance, but even if that was true (which at the moment, in my opinion, it is not) then every team is in the same situation and has to deal with poorly balanced classes which will therefore not make games any less competitive and may even make them more interesting.

I hope that Anet continues with esports events because I will never get bored of them and burn out like I would on any ingame content eventually regardless of its quality. There is nothing that could happen to make me dislike the pro league because it is just so unpredictable and exciting every single week and when I get to watch an especially awesome and close game like vermillion against abjured in the season 1 finals on temple, there is no feeling the game itself could give me that compares to that.

Concidering that most people just wish to rage because they cant invest so much time to be good in spvp…concidering majority of people either ignore the meaning of “balance” or their idea of balance is “make my character able to have a chance win every other class in 1v1”….concidering most people dont even know what an esport is…concidering most people dont even know that gw2 is the first seriouse try of a MMO RPG to enter esportig…and concidering most people think that a good esport should have the views of MOBA games….i doubt polls like that would ever be helpful.
Gw2 gives a good amount of money in official tournaments and that already make it an esport…simple as that…ofc game needs many improvment (even moba and shoot em up games keeps improving every month) like some class balance (NOT the one most ppl think) and ofc a better spectator mode (plz plz Anet)…but that is far from the rage that the “i was high in lolleaderboards and now i dont even think enter a decent team and try for pro league” people throw at forums every 10 threads.

Pretty bad. The only interesting thing in esportz was the recent dramaaaa, the matches themselves and the outcomes or even the comps don’t really interest me.

I used to watch SC2 when it first came out the streams and the esportz was pretty hyped back then (heard it isn’t anymore but idk). None of that right now when it comes to GW2’s PvP.

Best MMORPG “Esports” game in the Western genre… not saying much because there really isn’t any esports mmorpgs.

I say it’s unfair to compare GW2 to pure pvp games that was designed entirely around competition so, I gave it a good rating.

I voted good, Guild Wars 2 its the best competitive RPG right now in my concept.
They have all to be in the eSports and they are going in a good way. The real problem its the community that don’t support the game and the large part of people plays PvE.

Here are some statistics that I found in Gw2Efficiency over 70.000 acounts.

Only 1% of the players have around 6000 games, and we are going to the 4th year!!!
Only 10% of the players have around 60%+ win rate.

This answers many raging topics in the forum that people complaining about many things, they don’t have experience/class mechanics in the game, this demands time of training.

In my case I play PvP to improve myself, independent of the Meta, and I really feel that game is getting balanced each season after the xpac.

I only think that Anet should make more balances and don’t wait to much. This is why i voted only good.

I like the ‘excellent’ votes. I wonder how much you got paid.

Voted bad.

Lets be realistic:

• Viewing GW2 is annoying: too much cluster kitten on the screen, too many and too big particle effects
• Combat system takes a lot of time to get into and understand what’s happening, which scares off new viewers
• No stand-alone PvP game like most other streamed games, and no seperate team for balancing
• Tied to this, classes are rather unbalanced
• Match-ups often result in blow-outs with 200, 300 or even 400 point differences.

Result: Guild wars 2 is fun to play (but I still rather play other PvP games because of poor class balance/matchmaking), but not fun to watch

Kraljevo.2801:

I like the ‘excellent’ votes. I wonder how much you got paid.

Technically I don’t know the exact amount. I got “paid” lots of gems (and some cash) because I’m actually good at the game and played on a competitive team that won tournaments. So yeah, I’m pretty happy with the game. Is it perfect? No. Is it “abysmal”? Absolutely not.

Bad;

Along with many of the responses, providing a band aid fix to balance by not allowing class stacking shows how dominant some classes are over others (and still are without proper balance).

XGhoul.7426:

Bad;

Along with many of the responses, providing a band aid fix to balance by not allowing class stacking shows how dominant some classes are over others (and still are without proper balance).

Class stacking should be bad since two of something means you aren’t taking something else. It’s still allowed in leagues however. An overall simplification should help. Some of the best games like the Street Fighter series and Chess have simple base mechanics but great strategic depth can stem from them.

The issue isn’t perfect balance at this point. It is getting within the ball park which the game is nowhere near. In my opinion this is sustain related.

in therms of me having fun while playing?
abysmal.
too much damage , minimal reaction options , it doesnt feel like an mmo to me.
maybe because i grew up playing lineage 2 and arenas in wow after but i bet id like gw1 pvp 100 times more also from the videos i watched.
killing people in two seconds aint my thing.

Abysmal. Even the pro-league teams don’t take the game seriously anymore. SPvP isn’t balanced, the dev team doesn’t put forth active effort to balance classes or specs. Most of their fixes are passive boons since they don’t want to put the effort into redesigning weapons or are concerned about community push-back.

Too much in this game is passive, and passive defenses in combination with the way condi’s work in this game basically force everyone to go condi if they don’t have obscene offensive burst potential (revenant is currently the only viable power option in the game for a reason.)

Anet has done very little to discourage the condi-meta, and really only reinforce it with the addition of even more passive defensive procs.

Bunker classes, because of the passive procs, can be absurdly frustrating to play against. I’ve seen Guardian’s have block up for 10 seconds straight, only to go directly into some other form of immunity into another string of block for another 10 seconds. That’s a problem. A lot of classes can do similar things, too.

If you want evidence that the e-sports scene is kitten, look no further than Vermillion telling the casters live on stream last night that none of them are taking the game seriously anymore and don’t even play it. If you want evidence that the semi-pro competitive scene is kitten, look no further than how prevalent Necromancers were late last season with 3+ per team each game. A balanced game doesn’t look like that.

Excellent. The viewing figures are incredible. The competitive community is thriving. The removal of solo queue and MMR leaderboards was awesome. Who needs in game tournaments too. And no new maps for 3 years? Some people say that is boring. I say it lets the tactics for those maps be specialized and leads to epic esports.

The new balance system is awesome. Merging all the traits so every spec has everything (damage, sustain, condi clear, stability, etc) was such a great idea. I love spamming skills its so much fun.

So yeh, this game is the pinnicle of skilled esports. I love it. It is Excellent.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Excellent. The viewing figures are incredible. The competitive community is thriving. The removal of solo queue and MMR leaderboards was awesome. Who needs in game tournaments too. And no new maps for 3 years? Some people say that is boring. I say it lets the tactics for those maps be specialized and leads to epic esports.

The new balance system is awesome. Merging all the traits so every spec has everything (damage, sustain, condi clear, stability, etc) was such a great idea. I love spamming skills its so much fun.

So yeh, this game is the pinnicle of skilled esports. I love it. It is Excellent.

Lol

What does a pro-league player say about the game?

1:18:05

https://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/65479402

Announcers: So, you guys have come in to this week of the pro league with a brand new roster, how do you think this is gonna work out for you? Do you think that going towards the finals that this new roster is able to contest the other teams?

Argi [Vermillion]: Finals?

Announcers: Towards the end of the season

Argi [Vermillion]: Oh yeah, that’s already dead, cuz we got ddos’d so..

Announcers: Ok, so there we go…

Argi [Vermillion]: We pretty much already like don’t take this game seriously anymore and pretty much moved on to other games right now, and as far as WTS, might take this game seriously again. Also it’s like every other game, there would have been a rematch, because things like for example, there are these bugs that are game breaking, and took the whole game to a rematch -and for us it’s like pfft, you know?

Announcer: I think maybe, what we’ll do is, wish you luck and root on for your performance, and move on with the rest with the game I think. Cheers, my friend, see you soon.

edit/

Abysmal, extremely poor viewer numbers that are dropping, teams that aren’t taking it seriously, a small number of players that are somewhat incestuous and poor balance and diversity.

I voted bad even though i really enjoy watching the matches there had been way too many disconnects and problems week in and week out

Abysmal.

Even before balance, even before diversity, even before meta. GW2 is a terrible game to watch, which is what “Esports” rides on.

In a MoBA everyone has a few select skills and the plays are obvious and strait forward, even the uninitiated become aware what is going on very quickly especially due to the gradual progression of the match, same but on a grander scale for SC. Here you have auto attack + weapon skill + heal + 3 utilites + elite + f1-f4ish + passive procs from traits + passive procs from runes and sigils + AI + shallow or fast tells + short cast times + cap point rotations + weird TTKs.

All which make a game fun (for some) to play and experience first hand, but throw 10 people into an arena with no gradual match progression, and it’s just not the same being an observer. It only really caterers to those who already have a vested interest, making it hard to grab new viewers.

IMO GW2 would be somewhat fun to “watch” (presuming you didn’t rework everything from the ground up) if they make it balanced on killing 1v1 to 3v3s and restricted more passive options outside of things that help set up main spikes.

jihm.2315:

in therms of me having fun while playing?
abysmal.
too much damage , minimal reaction options , it doesnt feel like an mmo to me.
maybe because i grew up playing lineage 2 and arenas in wow after but i bet id like gw1 pvp 100 times more also from the videos i watched.
killing people in two seconds aint my thing.

Gw1 had it’s prob;ems but at least it was fun to watch. Classes were very rigid in their roles and abilities and combat moved at a pace where you could tell what the kitten was happening in front of you.

GW2 pvp is a giant clusterkitten of skill effects that spam too quickly from classes that don’t have any significant role diversity to an uninitiated observer. (Druid being an obvious exception to this though most will come in expecting the healer to do nothing but heal/support)

Show a new viewer a fight between a Reaper and a Tempest and all they are going to see is a pair of mages hitting each other with tons of swirly colors rapidly with the only discernible difference being one is ‘death themed’ and the other is ‘elements themed’.

If GW1 was like chess then GW2 is like taking all the pieces and putting them in the laundry dryer.

Substance E.4852:

If GW1 was like chess then GW2 is like taking all the pieces and putting them in the laundry dryer.

I lol’d.

Abysmal. They need their balance team to be the pvp team and get rid of the esport concept. Anet is just a cash cow these days.

i vote excellence
1. no build diversity
2. which force every patch for rebalance through amulets mainly
3. which result in meta boring build with no counter play
3. no beta test area
4. which result in hot fix (bad fix)
5. which all of them result in boring matchups with no interest

Bad.

Poor balance, overall combat design has suffered greatly in the past year and a half, any fights larger than 2v2 is a chaotic mess to watch, lack of competition..

This is clearly mirrored in player interest as well. The last WTS final had 10k concurrent viewers. Not particularly high but far better than the recent pro league final (s1), which peaked at about 4k. The weekly rounds barely break 2k.
When they held the challenger cup (qualifiers for the pro league), 25 teams were eligible to sign up for 16 spots in each region. They only got 10 in EU and 9 in NA.

Personally, I think HoT killed any chance they had at glorious esportz. Up until early 2015, they’d made good progress. Lots of small steps in the right direction. But HoT (and to a lesser extent the specialization update in June) was a huge leap backwards, and advertising the game through a pro league when it was in its absolute worst state ever probable didn’t do them any favors.

Abysmal.

Here are some of the reasons. Relying on a third party organiser (ESL) to do all your tournament work since day one has been the worst choice for the game’s competitive scene. Competition should be accessible in-game without the need to follow third party rules and regulations, broken intrusive clients like ESL Wire etc.
These are some of the reasons why the scene has been so small throughout the four years of it’s existence. There were never more than five decent teams per region in GW2 PvP because forming and competing with a team was never promoted well and has been looked at as a hassle. The ranking system has been changing drastically every year. We started with the qualification points system and then had multiple leaderboards ending up with a pseudo-league with very questionable matchmaking and progression plus we lost our separate solo queue ladder with the excuse of the playerbase being too small. “Esports” always looked forced in GW2 ever since the beta days. Anet focused more resources on financing and promoting a non-existant competitive scene instead of making the game fun and balanced most of the time. And here comes that part. I can’t remember another game with a lower amount of skills/traits to work with being constantly rebalanced over and over and over again which always leads to a bigger mess then before. Now with HoT they’ve pretty much invalidated every build that excludes the elite specs which sinks the diversity even deeper. There is no theorycrafting, there is no high level mechanical play. There are only passive plays with over the top meta builds. You either play what the developer decided you must play or you’re stuck ten miles behind which leads to mind – the balancing has almost always involved all three gamemodes at once. And last but not least – the game is very hard to follow as a stream spectator. A lot of games received intuitive camera improvements for easier casting while GW2 did not. Even as an experienced player I have hard times following what is going on while watching and now imagine someone who has never played the game and/or pvp before.

Average.

There’s nothing breath-taking that makes SPvP stand out over other competitive games.
Yet for whatever reason we all continue to play in it because a) the combat system is just too good, and b) we have invested a lot of time into the game, in the slim chance it becomes better.

There’s never been a balanced competitive E-Sports, any small changes can completely shift the meta, breaking something or making something much too strong. What actually matters is if despite these changes there still exists a skill-curve for running something versus another player running that same exact thing, and if it is fun for both sides to do so. If someone complains about how they just lost their main, or someone else gloats about how their build just became op, welcome to the never-ending cycle of balancing. Just promote healthy competitive gameplay, and all is well.

What’s actually the worst thing is how difficult it is to get players to watch competitive games, the spectator mode needs the most work and there needs to be information pointed at the spectators about what is going on. No one new can go into an ESL stream and understand everything, it needs a lot of help.

Another thing that likely should not even be mentioned is to foster a healthy competitive tournament format that should hardly ever change, especially in mid-swing. Standardization is key.

People usually go for class balance and specifics, but for me the problem is much deeper yet also much simpler – the sPvP gameplay mode just isnt fun to watch. It’s never been. It’s just simple hold the point. Every. Time. Hell theres even simpler modes that are much more fun, such as the single attack/defend point in for example Overwatch. There I become genuinly intrigued in the battle that’s going on and how individual players deal with it . On a GW2 center point its like “meh the fight is ok, but now the enemy will just go around and cap something else because thats how you win”.

I think we know the balance team doesn’t balance very well and the matchmaking guy doesn’t matchmake very well.

That said, those two things have little to do with eSports. The problem that ANET has is two-fold:

1. The PvP marketing team isn’t very good. They didn’t even announce the S2 finals until a few days beforehand. Get some hype going earlier.
2. Give more focus on pro league streamers. Again, you need to build the hype. When you have top players in the game getting virtually no viewers, it is a problem.

E-what?
This game is not about skills, it is not about being skilled.
Just about taking the Class and Build that can make you OP, or easy win above average.

The team Balance is full of troll not knowing their Job. (this is a statement based on fact!!!). Your Balance is kitten. We saw how you balance a game last past month/years.

Bug Fix feel like a Free to play game, 1 every 3 months even less
You don’t even feel like you bought this game. They don’t care.

E-Sport? the guy with his competitiv dream (saying: if you like WvW you like PvE) can forget about it. Spend more money in E-Sport instead of doing something productive.

You want to make a Pro race, you don’t even have a car. This what is GW2 E-sport. NOTHING

Average response: “Bad” – based on 410 responses.

A year ago, I wager there probably would have been only two responses, bad or abysmal.

I predict it will continue to be harder from here to improve SPvP as an ESport until more things are concretely set in stone and finished.

Spectator Mode is not nearly good enough, and the competitive scene needs more help, not on the ‘Tournament Cash Reward’ end but the structures to facilitate and bring in teams to compete. If they want to do that through the League System, that too needs a major overhaul at higher levels.

Anets hesitation to balance their game during season 1 did irreversible damage to the games esports image. To this day nothing has changed to make pvp even slightly more intriguing. We’re still stuck in the most depressing map in the game while we queue, Leagues is still a joke and legend is meaningless, still stuck with terrible unranked matchmaking during offseason, and build diversity is non existent. Yeah, they fixed bunker wars but then what.

Sykper.6583:

A year ago, I wager there probably would have been only two responses, bad or abysmal.

A year ago, I would have voted average. It wasn’t amazing, but still interesting to watch for people who played PvP.

Today it’s abysmal. HoT power creep is ridiculous and killed diversity. It’s the same 6 HoT builds over and over, and they practically play themselves. Why bother watching top players?