Guild Wars 2

Before you read on let me say that the following are NOT the reasons:
-Individual profession imbalance
-Game modes
-Tertiary incentives (gold/PvE rewards etc.)
—-
Pre-release, GW2 was already being touted as a possible e-sports game. I’m sure many competitive players were very excited when they heard Jon Peters say that he was a competitive player with LoL experience. The game was very exciting for me (as I’m sure it was for many others) post-release. However, the enjoyment dwindled(not rapidly) as I realized that the game was very limited compared to MOBAs, largely as a result of game engine restrictions.

No skillshots
The game does not have skill shots and jukes and as a result there is very limited room for development as a player over a long enough period of time. Dodge rolls do not bring the same amount of counterplay and counter-counter-play as the intricate dance of jukes and skillshots. Due to these restrictions, the devs rightly focused on the following aspects of gameplay to keep people excited:
-map elements
-damage immunity frames (as opposed to skilled avoidance)
-conditions and counter-conditions
-healing
However, with these elements the learning curve steeply declines after a period of time. Someone who plays LoL or Smite for instance, can continue to make dramatic and meaningful improvements in their gameplay after months and months (even years) of playing the same champion/god as they learn to to improve their juking and counterjuking against better and better players. The gap between the skilled pro player and the average player is enormous and you can see amazing plays by the pro players in weekly tournaments. This incentivizes players to keep playing and practicing to improve their gameplay.

Sustain
GW2’s gameplay is perceived much more as a number crunch game and build-wars game similar to PvP in most mmorpgs. The level of sustain, damage immunity frames and counter-CC cannot be compared to that of competitive games. You have ping-ponging health bars. There is no long term resource such as mana, resulting in fights of potentially infinite length. Paired with the fact that there are so many skill cooldowns available to a character at any given time, there is a lot of skill spam with no penalty.

Cooldowns
In any competitive game you have a very limited pool of skill cooldowns available to you, 4 short cooldowns with medium~high impact/value (straight damage CDs are medium. CC and movement abilities are high), and one long high impact, high value cooldown(ulti). There is the possibility of leaving yourself vulnerable without any cooldowns available at your disposal, or there is the possibility of depleting all of your mana. There are few enough cooldowns that as a player or a spectator or a tournament caster you are able to know which cooldowns are available to a character resulting in a good amount of predictability.

In GW2 there are a large number of skills, all with low impact. Low impact because of the ping-ponging health bar aspect and high amount of damage immunity frames and CC/condi removal options.

Static vs. customizable cooldowns
In any competitive game prediction and counterplay is tantamount. In GW2 not only does the high amount of cooldown availability limit prediction, but prediction is greatly limited by the fact that more than half the cooldowns are customizable and unknown. The only visual tip off you get is your opponent’s class and currently equipped weapon set. Taking into consideration alternate weapon set, utility skills, elite skills and traits there is a large number of permutations to account for. In a slower paced game like Magic or Hearthstone this would be reasonable, but in a fast paced game it is not.

In mobas there are only two customizable skills with very long cooldowns. The skill options for these two slots are shared by all characters and furthermore you know exactly which two skills your opponents have chosen to to put in those slots. Combined with the fact that each god/champion has a static set of skills, you know exactly what your opponent is capable of.

The high number of customizable skills/traits in GW2 also poses balancing issues because devs too have to deal with the impossible task of accounting for all the multitudes of player choice possibilities when balancing. By contrast, in mobas, given that each god/champion is defined by a static set of skills, there are fewer interactions to account for. Furthermore, devs can pull statistics about certain god/champion’s win/loss, kill/death rate in order to help balancing. The result is a perceptually more polished game in terms of balance.

Conclusion
It is impossible for a game to satisfy both the competitive gaming audience and the casual mmo audience because they have fundamentally different needs. The mmo audience is motivated by tertiary objectives like gold and experience to keep them interested. The competitive gamers are only interested in a competitive environment where the rules (of atleast one game-mode) are equitable and accepted by a large competitive community, where there is room for growth as an athlete and where success is a function of personal and team skill level over anything else. While I’m sad that GW2 could not live up to its initial expectations in terms of competitiveness, the path that the game is taking now is certainly understandable from a business perspective especially given that the large majority of the remaining players are mmo gamers.

Hrmm interesting. I don’t play mobas because I thought they looked too simplistic. Your argument, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the simplicity actually adds depth because you know what to expect/avoid. Too many permutations and the opponents can’t react/preact to eachother. It’s something to think about I guess, ty.

One thing though, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you consider yourself a high-tier gw2 player? When you’re familiar with meta specs I’d argue you can reasonably anticipate what players will do in GW2. But still, point taken I think.

Brigg.6189:

Hrmm interesting. I don’t play mobas because I thought they looked too simplistic. Your argument, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the simplicity actually adds depth because you know what to expect/avoid. Too many permutations and the opponents can’t react/preact to eachother. It’s something to think about I guess, ty.

The thing about MOBAs is that, despite the extremely limited set of skills available to a player, they are very complex in the context of the entire game. If you look at a game of Dota 2, you’re not watching 5v5 combat between players with four skills each, you’re looking at a whole map with creeps (which involve tactics such as creep stacking, creep pulling, and creep wave times as well as creep power… creep over time), four tiers of towers (which effect creep equilibrium as well as team map control), lane rotations and how roles choose to lane. There’s xp levelling as well as gold generation from creep and player kills. There’s the order players choose to level up their skills as they gain experience. There’s items and item builds and item build order and item active and passive functions. What a MOBA might lack in combat compared to GW2 is made up in literally everything else, and all that has to be kept in mind by players and teams as a match goes on. Combat is a minimal element in the large scale system, although it is a pivotal element in that it effects everything else.

Guild Wars 2 is different. Conquest doesn’t have the complexities of a MOBA map, but it shares some key points. Rotations are still important in order to ensure you have the right players in the right place at the right time. There’s still an element of map control, and while not as rigid or progression-based as in a MOBA, it effects where and when engagements occur. However, you’re still not dealing with creep waves or neutral camps or farming, you’re not dealing with progressive skill or item builds, and you’re not dealing with team gold or experience deficits or advantages as a match progresses, and this frees up attention to be placed elsewhere.

So we have, generally speaking, access to twenty skills with scaling cooldowns. One’s locked to a heal (though some are passive, but whether or not that is detrimental is an argument for another day). I don’t think number is really an issue. What can be an issue, and is an issue, is how skills are implemented, how combat mechanics function, and how players have to interact with these systems.

Play and counter-play (and by extension, counter-counter-play) are the pillars of combat in a cooldown-abilities based game. This is where GW2 dives too far to the opposite end of the spectrum, into unmanageable complexity. In a MOBA, you generally have a solid understanding of what the enemy players are capable of, what you are capable of, and that if an ability is used by either party, it will be on cooldown and the parameters of the engagement change accordingly. If an enemy misses a skill, that creates opportunity. If you do not manage to avoid their skill, you have to react accordingly. Perhaps it’s using an escape skill to avoid further damage. Perhaps it’s using a burst because you know it will force them to retreat. If you wanted to, you could make a timeline and plot out an engagement and understand how the decisions players made effected the outcome of the engagement, as well as map how things could have been handled differently. This isn’t simplicity, but gameplay with tactical and strategic value.

This is where Guild Wars 2 is lacking. While the base combat mechanics are great – active movement, dodging, Line-of-Sight evaluation and all – everything that is layered on top of it is destructive to the combat experience. Many engagements are just a game of popping things on cooldown with minimal concern, and letting the game do the math to figure out whose skills stack for better damage over time. Pacing is only a concern for specific classes and builds. Pacing is entirely not a concern for others (coughinitiativethievescough). Risk/reward is a kind of foreign concept when it comes to skill use, and it’s hard to truly exert pressure when both you and your enemy are both just hit every key you can and healing every chance you get.

So we’re not even looking at combat as complex vs. simple, we’re looking at the need for a multifaceted balance between complexity in certain areas and simplicity in others, and right now, everything is askew.

Skill timing is too simple. Right now it’s pretty effective to just use weapon skills on cooldown for most classes. Skill use is too simple as well. The vast majority of skills are just target-and-forget functionality, and the strength they have is inordinate for the lack of play involved in using them. This is where Geff talking about skill shots comes in. If using a skill has significant impact in an engagement, it should not be a simple button press and half second cast onto a target, waiting 20 seconds, and doing it again.

Roles right now are super simple. Either you are some form of bunker (guardian, spirit ranger, decap engineer) or you are roaming damage (everything else), more or less. Compare this to other competitive games where you’re getting melee damage, ranged damage, support, ganking roles. CC. High health “tanks”. Team compositions are built around the variety of options players have. GW2 might have killed the PvE trinity, but PvP needs a better defined framework for players to work within. The development of roles and role-based team comps would add beneficial complexity to the metagame.

Countering, in whatever form that takes, should add a layer of beneficial complexity to the game. Currently either you are a class and build that counters another specific class and build, or you are getting rolled through. There’s certain matchups which should clearly favor one player or another based on what they are running – this is part of developing player roles in team compositions – but right now winning an engagement is firmly anchored to certain builds and player skill is irrelevant, as is what a player has available to them. Doesn’t matter if you have an escape skill if you’re getting permanently stunned and immobilized by a warrior. Doesn’t matter if you have burst, you’re not going to pressure that thief to withdraw, cause they’ll just Withdraw (see what I did there) and reengage. There should be fairly involved play and counterplay.

Conditions are a source of unnecessary complexity. There’s so many, and it’s easy to accumulate many of them, and there’s not enough condition clear in the entire game to deal with the sheer number and rate at which they can be applied and stacked. In a MOBA, damage-over-time effects have a certain rarity to them, and if a skill has a DoT component, applying it is the main point of the skill. Compare this to GW2 where everything is passively applying bleeds and cripples everywhere, or doing a massive amount of direct damage in combination with a strong condition effect, and the entire condition system becomes difficult for players to deal with.

So again, it’s not a matter of GW2 being too complex, or too simple, or how any other games compare: it’s a matter of the systems present in GW2 being too simple or too complex in the wrong areas that’s hindering its development as a competitive game.

Brigg.6189:

When you’re familiar with meta specs I’d argue you can reasonably anticipate what players will do in GW2.

I agree, certain popular builds like hambow create a level of prediction. But, even if say they make a system wherein who can see all of your opponent’s traits and utilities before the start of a match, the problem of high cooldown availability still persists. You will probably never find a player in GW2 with 0 cooldowns available at a given time. Relative to a moba each skill in GW2 is of a much lower impact.

It’s difficult to explain to a non-moba player. I’ll use an example of one of my favorite moments in the game Smite.

I was playing the god Fenrir in arena and the enemy team had a Thanatos. Thanatos has an ultimate ability wherein whenever any member of the opposing team is below a certain % health (20~30% depending on rank) he can 1-shot them with his ulti. The ultimate works like this: when his ultimate cooldown is available and an enemy is below the health threshold for 1-shot, he hears the sound of a heart beating. When he activates the ulti he goes up into the air; he can then move around the map while in flight for duration. While he is in the air a round AoE ground targetter appears on the ground, when he clicks on a location he lands at that spot. If an enemy below the health threshold for 1-shot is caught in the AoE he will be killed, otherwise the ability simply does damage ans stuns. But, there is a brief moment between the time he clicks the ground and the time he lands (about 0.2~0.3 seconds?) so the ability can be juked.

On my Fenrir I was really low health (like 1 Health) after a team fight, and I jumped over a wall to safety, but I knew that I was below the health threshold and I heard the opposing team’s thanatos go up into the air so I knew that he would try to land on me. I was running toward my base, and anticipating when he was going to land I made an abrupt 360 which made the thanatos miss his ulti. He landed behind me.

At this point I had limited options because my jump was on cooldown (I used it to leap over the wall earlier) and the only cooldowns available to me was an attack damage buff(useless atm) and Brutalize which is a very short distance AoE skillshot. Brutalize makes you teleport a very short distance to the targetted area and do damage, kind of like warrior’s earthshaker, but with a much smaller radius, shorter distance traveled and shorter animation, and you stick to the target for a short period of time if you land it.

I knew that thanatos had two threatening abilities at his disposal, a large easy to hit 180degree frontal AoE damage+silence and a difficult to hit projectile skillshot.

I turned around to face thanatos and immediately used my Brutalize to teleport directly behind him (intentionally missing it and using it only as a form of escape). As expected, I juked his frontal cone ability by teleporting behind him. He then turned around and used his projectile which I was able to juke with a rapid camera turn as I was running toward my base. At this time an allied Ymir came to save my life by making a wall between me and thanatos and I was able to escape with 1 health!

Needless to say my heart was beating very fast and the adrenaline was pumping.

I know it was a long story but hopefully it is of some use in understanding the kinds of thought processes that go through the mind of a moba player, and the kinds of plays that are possible.

When I play GW2 I always end up macro spamming a bunch of low-impact skills immediately as they come off cooldown. The same level of forethought does not go into the gameplay decisions. I am rank 42 so I’m not a complete noob. I haven’t played GW2 except occasionally for the past several months.

Great discussion, I hope something comes from it.

I would love more skill-shots. The lack of skill shots is why they can’t make ranged on par with melee.
-a ranger

Comparing an MMO based PvP system to a Moba is pretty strange.

Geff, did you ever play the original Guild Wars? It’s one of the most “skill-shot” driven PvP systems I’ve ever played. It had a wildly successful PvP system. However, Anet learned from this format that it’s not for everyone, and decided to broaden their PvP playability to more than a limited niche of players. That’s actually why Guild Wars’ GvG community is still very active. I’m largely a proponent for a more complex, skill oriented, dont-miss-a-step-or-you’re-pooched style of PvP, but GW2 has a lot going for it.

While roles seem weak at the moment, it’s not by design. It’s essentially through exploitation of a relatively unbalanced meta game. There are really great theory-crafting possibilities available in this game. However, the large majority of the player base would rather simply run a meta “OP” build because it works well versus a majority of other meta builds. There is room for team-building on GW2; there’s room for skill oriented spikes and tactical elements though team-building that would make the game play MUCH more interesting and complex. The majority of players in PvP on GW2 aren’t interested in playing in such as fashion leaving the team-building concepts limited to high ranking (60+) teams and e-sport tourneys. The odd thing is, people will watch these tourneys, take a build out of context, and try to use it in other manners of PvP play. I thought the community would eventually come to the realization of a more complex method of PvP (as GW1 evolved from Ignite Arrows+Dual Shot spikes to the plethora of complex team builds seen throughout the game’s life).

If you consider roles such as the Portal Repair Mesmer on Khylo, Thieves focusing on Hunts (Niflhel) and Lord Pit (Foefire), Ledge Eles and Nade Engies on maps like Temple, Foefire, Niflhel, etc… and other roles that take more specified and calculated goals into account, there are actually a lot of role variations in GW2 PvP.

I think that’s their motivation with these new traits being introduced. It’s to expand the versatility and playability of a given profession to give more role viability to each profession. Mesmers and Eles are acquiring a viable support healing build, Warriors are given the opportunity to become a Might factory with support, etc…

If Anet devs make a point to try and focus on balancing to equalize role positioning and make a solid attempt to balance the already prominent issues and any that make emerge as new traits and skills are introduced, then I think there could be a solid potential for complex, team-oriented game play.

GW2 has a good PvP foundation but Anet is too focused on PvE content which, over time, leads to delays in and/or complete failure in fixing the little issues that keep adding up to drag down the overall PvP experience. Lack of a tutorial for new players, the utter mess hotjoin is, the flawed matchmaking, leavers, skyhammer, lack of meaningful rewards, broken leaderboards, the same meta builds lasting for months, weird little bugs and glitches, irrelevant and meaningless player score calculation in matches….

the list goes on but these are all things that a PvP-focused game would have nipped one at a time. Instead, the issues list just keeps growing and now it’s 50% of my soloq matches that I either have 4v5, ranks <20 vs all >40, or skyhammer all while receiving no meaningful rewards or even a sense of working towards a meaningful accomplishment.

The game mode needs an overhaul that is so long overdue that at this point would require more resources than Anet is going to be willing to devote to a player base that doesn’t spend as much money as the PvE’ers.

@Mythoryk: you misunderstand. I am judging competitive game with a higher standard. A simplistic definition of an e-sport game would be a game that has weekly casted tournaments with cash prizes and one in which there are professional teams that are sponsored. But, you have to realize that in such a game the merits of the gameplay make it worthy of being a “sport”.

1.) As an athlete, hours in must equate to skill out in a nearly linear manner at first, as you put more and more hours in your skill gain might come at a slower pace, but the function for hours in vs. skill out can’t have an asymptote. Without skillshots and juking it does reach an asymptote because the game eventually becomes a number crunch.

2.) The individual skill level of the player must be the biggest determinant of success. It must be a much greater factor than team comp or luck or even teamwork. In mobas, if you are good enough you have the potential to carry a very bad team and pull off 2v1’s or 3v1’s or even 4v1’s if you play perfectly. The best athletes can pull off amazing plays and escape or wipe the enemy team against all odds, that’s what makes them an “athlete” and that’s what brings in the high spectatorship, sponsorships and competition. That’s also why the youtube series “Random LoL moments” is currently sitting at 200+ episodes and around 500k views each.

@Solstice & @Nineaxis: I disagree with your points about game mode. Look at the game bloodline champions. It was a very successful e-sport for a long time with weekly cash tournaments and amazing sponsored teams (most notably In Soviet Russia/SK gaming) and the game mode was a simple 3v3 whoever kills everyone on the enemy team wins. The game is still one of the highest skill cap games on the market.

@Solstice: I whole heartedly disgree with your comment about rewards. Look at LoL, or smite, or any moba or even any fps. Look at the rewards you gain after each match and then ask yourself would the games still be successful if all the post-game rewards were removed. Are the players in those games motivated by rewards or the fun of gameplay?

@Sube Dai why must something come of it? I was not intending for this topic to be advisory or critical, it is merely meant to be informative. I’m not sure if it’s informative to the devs. At the very least it’s probably informative to casual mmo players, who live in their microcosm of mmorpg games, and who as I’ve mentioned comprises a large majority of GW2’s population. I repeat, given that most players are casual mmo players the path that GW2 is taking is the sound one from a business perspective.

As I recall back around the time of PAX Prime there were several forum posts on these very forums admonishing the devs’ pursuit of e-sports. That combined with the numerous forum topics asking for PvP rewards paints a very clear picture about the priorities of GW2’s PvP community.

Geff.1930:

@Mythoryk: you misunderstand. I am judging competitive game with a higher standard. A simplistic definition of an e-sport game would be a game that has weekly casted tournaments with cash prizes and one in which there are professional teams that are sponsored. But, you have to realize that in such a game the merits of the gameplay make it worthy of being a “sport”.

1.) As an athlete, hours in must equate to skill out in a nearly linear manner at first, as you put more and more hours in your skill gain might come at a slower pace, but the function for hours in vs. skill out can’t have an asymptote. Without skillshots and juking it does reach an asymptote because the game eventually becomes a number crunch.

2.) The individual skill level of the player must be the biggest determinant of success. It must be a much greater factor than team comp or luck or even teamwork. In mobas, if you are good enough you have the potential to carry a very bad team and pull off 2v1’s or 3v1’s or even 4v1’s if you play perfectly. The best athletes can pull off amazing plays and escape or wipe the enemy team against all odds, that’s what makes them an “athlete” and that’s what brings in the high spectatorship, sponsorships and competition. That’s also why the youtube series “Random LoL moments” is currently sitting at 200+ episodes and around 500k views each.

I understand your position. However, the majority of MMO PvP players, and Guild Wars PvPers in particular aren’t interested in game play wherein a single player can carry 4 others. The current GW2 PvP game can, however, be completely demolished by the presence of a single weak link. So, in regard to your concerns, I suppose the motivation of NOT being that weak link is more-so the focus of the individual player than trying to carry their team.

That’s not saying that a single player can’t impact the game substantially. If someone is a champ at Portal Repairing on Kyhlo… trust me… the impact is obvious. If a thief knows how to land crucial Hunt steals on Niflhel, the game can easily be controlled. If a bunker knows exactly when and where to rotate and has the ability to sustainably bunker vs 3 enemies, the game can certainly be controlled.

This game isn’t actually designed around “skill-shots.” They stated that from the beginning. They’ve always said it was about positioning and tactical forethought. If a player has a tactical perspective and a broad knowledge of all classes, that individual can be more of an asset to the team than someone with limited knowledge of skills and tactics being used against them. Plain and simple.

I personally feel this game can achieve the level of complexity in PvP that Guild Wars experienced. (You can cancel cast, interrupts are becoming more prominent, more healing support possibilities are emerging, etc…) However, it will take the work of the community itself to bring it to that point.

If you feel this strongly about the PvP in this game, do something to help change it. Create a guild or at least a solid core team of 5 that can win tournaments regularly. Theory craft a team build to support your concept of play-style. Consistently speak on these forums in regard to your concerns.

I want to make myself clear. I’m not against your position, in the least. I’m simply trying to show you that there’s a lot of room for GW2 to grow. It took a few years before GW1’s pvp really took shape. I’m still waiting around to see what happens with GW2. (I would seriously love a team-based vertical progression PvP format similar to HA.)

Geff.1930:

Reasons for competitive player disinterest…

where have you been for the past two years?
Legitimate esports teams, in beta, were saying this game might end up as a popular casual-streamed game but won’t ever be anything top tier competitive.

Geff.1930:

Conclusion
It is impossible for a game to satisfy both the competitive gaming audience and the casual mmo audience because they have fundamentally different needs..

That’s debatable… if you mean, an esports style game mode and set of classes will never draw a casual MMO market… sure, but games don’t tend to stick to one game mode or a limited set of classes. I wouldn’t say “it is impossible” just “it is tough”.

Anyways, I don’t think Anet ever seriously aimed for this game to be LoL-level competitive. I mean, they could have had it as their goal and just seriously kittened up HARD-CORE in every way possible, but if that wasn’t the case, at best they seemed to aim for it to be WoW level competitive with more of a focus on shallow esports features (rollercoaster-leaderboards, monthly tournaments, exc.) stuff to draw in all those players who thought LoL/Smite/Dota/WoW are too serious, yet still want to be a lil competitive.

garethh.3518:

Anyways, I don’t think Anet ever seriously aimed for this game to be LoL-level competitive. I mean, they could have had it as their goal and just seriously kittened up HARD-CORE in every way possible, but if that wasn’t the case, at best they seemed to aim for it to be WoW level competitive with more of a focus on shallow esports features (rollercoaster-leaderboards, monthly tournaments, exc.) stuff to draw in all those players who thought LoL/Smite/Dota/WoW are too serious, yet still want to be a lil competitive.

I think their casual approach to competitive play has more to do with the level to which Guild Wars became competitive. To the core GW1 PvP community, it was every bit as competitive as LoL. Perhaps more-so. I think they wanted to attempt to avoid the absolute flame-fest that Guild Wars eventually turned into, the elitism that inevitably spawned from it, and the constant balancing that was needed to combat the substantial thirst for exploitation. I mean, the constant desire to best your rivals in HA/GvG became so prominent that botting interrupts/blinds was meta at one point – to the point that Anet actually banned 3700 accounts at once.

garethh.3518:

Anyways, I don’t think Anet ever seriously aimed for this game to be LoL-level competitive. I mean, they could have had it as their goal and just seriously kittened up HARD-CORE in every way possible, but if that wasn’t the case, at best they seemed to aim for it to be WoW level competitive with more of a focus on shallow esports features (rollercoaster-leaderboards, monthly tournaments, exc.) stuff to draw in all those players who thought LoL/Smite/Dota/WoW are too serious, yet still want to be a lil competitive.

You are probably right. I was hoping for a more hard core competitive scene since before launch, especially when I heard that there would be no element of grind in PvP resulting in a balanced environment.

Too much access to CCs
and builds hard counters.

Brigg.6189:

correct me if I’m wrong, is that the simplicity actually adds depth because you know what to expect/avoid. Too many permutations and the opponents can’t react/preact to eachother. It’s something to think about I guess, ty.

It’s about finding a balance. Too few options and things get stale quickly. Too many options and it becomes a nightmare to balance and leads too a lot of rock/paper/scissors where no matter what, you’ll win because your builds beats your opponents’ builds. GW2 is on the side of too many options.