… and some suggestions for improvement.
What i liked so much about GW1 and since then never encountered in any MMORPG was the unimaginable variety beyond all scale. You could reinvent the game as you pleased and the small programs like „Team Builder“ are in my opinion the best proof of that uniqueness.
I remember pondering with friends about builds for hours and carefully „exploring“ enemy builds in the first moments of contact. Gameplay changed so regularly and was challenging me in new ways over and over again to progress PvP fame and guild rating and beat prestigious enemies or unknown builds.
The best endgame I’ve ever played.
But even more important was, that you could play your builds in 6 very different arenas (RA, TA, HA, GvG, 2x faction wars) and it was usually a face to face combat – only 2 fronts at most.
I know, the game designers where unhappy with the uneven distribution of responsibility across back- and front-line and i can understand their approach very well of fixing it by mixing the roles in every class and thats totally okay. This criticism is not about the class architecture itself, which is in my opinion not the most important aspect of a PvP endgame and also not about balancing issues with certain skills or builds.
Its about the general pvp setup in GW2 and i believe there are some significant failures by design.
The best way to illustrate this is WvW.
In the early days of World of Warcraft, there was a PvP feature very similar to WvW. It was a mass battle between the factions for control points, called „Alterac Valley“ and the main differences between these two are in my opinion symptomatic for some of the flaws of the PvP design.
The teams in the Alterac Valley were kept even, so in order to join, you had to join a queue first and wait and – and thats basically my main point of criticism – the map design was mostly linear, which means there was a main path of attack, well thought battlefields between the capture points and of course sometimes small sideways, like GvG in GW1 only on a bigger scale.
In WvW, there is no team balancing and the map design allows much more angles of attack and a non-linear capture route. It often happens in WvW, that 2 huge groups of players circled around each other, capturing points that minutes ago were taken by the other team.
This kind of grind might be the best way to get karma and currency for ascended gear but calling this PvP is like calling the main storyline of GW2 a multiplayer task.
The biggest problem with huge maps (and imbalanced team sizes) is, that it leads to imbalanced encounters between the opponents and this problem even exists in the smaller 5v5 arenas.
Imbalanced encounters are the main source of frustration!
In 5v5, the fast paced gameplay encourages tunnel vision, so its more likely that you wont see the enemy reenforcement coming and the only thing that i see, that tackles this problem would be good team communication and the same level of tactical awareness throughout the whole team, which is of course unrealistic in random arenas.
The second gigantic failure is, that there is no real PvP endgame compared to as it is in GW1.
No title or guild rating hierarchy, no unique rewards combined to permanent team arenas for strategic ambitions and compared to GW1, basically only one arena type, conquest.
The fact, that the game „Guild Wars 2“ has no GvG feature after 3 years since the release is the main reason why i call it a design failure and that HoT adds more PvE content than PvP brings me to the conclusion that the design priorities between GW1 and GW2 are the complete opposite.
I have to say, PvE is very well done. The best I’ve ever seen so far but even the best AI can’t change the static nature of all of the PvE content.
Once u know the mechanics and mastered positioning, timing and composition, the challenge fades away and all that remains is repetition for drop chances or accumulating currencies or materials.
If Balthazar is real, he would be enraged about the HoT extension, adding more layers of grind to the PvE endgame and as hardcore PvP fans, my friends and me will turn our backs to GW2, proudly saying, that we never put money into the gem shop to buy a shortcut around the grind, if HoT disappoints our expectations in terms of PvP endgame.
I wouldn’t have bought this game in the first place without its name and my expectations derived from GW1. I knew the bad reviews. The only thing, what GW1 and GW2 have in common is the universe they are set in and this is what a parody defines!
The unprecedented beauty of GW1 hasn’t been ported to GW2 which would be okay if it were replaced by something worthy but the shift of priorities, from an ingenious PvP setup and very static PvE content in GW1 to the exact opposite in GW2 feels like a betrayal and an incredible loss.
My suggestions for rescuing the PvP stage aren’t that surprising.
- More face to face combat = fewer imbalanced encounters.
Triple or quadruple the size of capture points. Put some coverage in the circles and set a fixed capture order in place, so that teams need to hold point B if they want to capture C (the enemy main base) and win the game. Only if eg. no guild lord has fallen and the time has run out, the winner is decided by points. This encourages combat and weakens ninja caps.
I know, this means a complete overhaul of the arena maps but i really don’t care about WvW as its not part of sPvP.
- Give players several longterm PvP goals!
(I can hardly resist the urge to add more exclamation marks here.)
Like i said, take a look at all the nice PvP achievements in GW1.
Title and ranking hierarchy, unique rewards/cosmetics and prestigious enemies in permanent team arenas.
The rewards don’t have to be unique. A chest for the winner at the end, that contains currencies and mats from a random dungeon but just in higher quantities and some higher chances of valuable drops could make it worth the effort for successful teams but it can’t be the only incentive!(!!!)
PvP success is all about prestige and honor and right now there is no way to show it. The PvP reward path you can choose is in my opinion just the ridiculous attempt to add a very ineffective grind component to PvP.
A spectator mode for high level PvP is also a very mighty community factor.
- More PvP variety.
5v5v5 like the good old AH in GW1.
Simpler, smaller and timely limited arenas in the WvW setting, like the faction arenas.
Solo arenas, since every role is present in every class. (Also nice to automatically detect imbalances between the classes.)
Team-only 5v5 or even 2×5 vs 2×5.
And all this with game modes like King of the hill, capture the flag, point domination (not conquest) or some sort of „Collecting run“. (Collect Items and bring them to NPC.)
There is basically just one (broken) arena type, conquest. Compared to 9 much larger and very sophisticated dungeons.
I am sill very skeptical about the GvG and league extension of HoT. If you only have the choice of solo or team conquest 5v5 – which is completely the same in terms of challenge and reward – and GvG, there will be still bored players left behind and I might be one of them.
I know, this all isn’t new to most people but I simply had to canalize my hate and disappointment.
Maybe, maybe these suggestion will be considered.
Hope dies at last and after HoT, when I decide to turn my back to GW2, expect my pure hatred.
