Guild Wars 2

With the large number of problems gating guildwars 2 to esports (passive play, lack of telegraphs, tournament support options, ladder issues, unbalanced team matches, class balance issues, bunker wars, buildwars, rank issues, the list goes on…).

Do you think maybe it would be better to give up on Esports and instead just focus on making the PvP content fun? As in new games types that move away from professional balance and instead focus on a funfactor (aka things like huttball, team fortress, etc.).

I feel like some of this is already coming with SPVP being merged into PvE with the standardization of gold as a pvp reward, the removal of glory, SoloQ, and talks about ranks being removed altogether.

Maybe this is a better direction for the game?

I don’t believe there is any focus on esports currently. We have finally gotten into the start of crafting a roadmap to where we can get the game balanced enough so that it’ll be fun to play, but I think it’s at least 7-10 months away from being there—because of how ducked up things got over the past 7 months.

Once that is done, or at least in a better place, we can start thinking about esports again. Until then, player/community run tournaments will have to do.

#BelieveInGrouch

No.

As a MOBA player I can tell you that this game will not be as balanced and as competitive as esport games unless the devs redesign the game’s systems from the ground up with a focus on balance. That will not happen because a large portion of GW2’s players are mmorpg players not moba players, they are accustomed to a high level of customization and a low level of balance. By contrast moba players are accustomed to a low level of customization and a high level of balance.

Balance and customization cannot co-exist, they have an inverse relationship with eachother. Moba games have many heroes/champions/gods but each individual hero has a limited pool of capabilities. Itemization provides low customizability, but the base capabilities remain intact. Furthermore, each hero has a access to much fewer active skill CDs at any given time. This encourages strategic use of CDs and not “wasting” CDs and making yourself vulnerable. But, at same the time each CD is much more impactful and can change the team fight dynamics extensively if used properly.

Health is a much more valueable resource in mobas because of the lack of access to heals, lack of a downed state and low access to damage immunity from dodges/invul/block. This encourages very strategic play and heavy consideration about positioning.

By contrast you have GW2 where a majority of skills are macro spammed when they come off cooldown. You get hurt, but you heal back up reducing the impact of any damage you have taken.

The two factors of spamminess and high sustain feed off eachother. You have high sustain, therefore players have to throw a slew of non-stop CDs at you. You have a slew of non-stop CDs therefore players have to have high sustain.

Mmo players should be familiar with this setup, but by no means is this e-sport material. Again, given that a large portion of GW2 playerbase is made up of mmorpg players this makes sense.

Geff.1930:

As a MOBA player I can tell you that this game will not be as balanced and as competitive as esport games unless the devs redesign the game’s systems from the ground up with a focus on balance. That will not happen because a large portion of GW2’s players are mmorpg players not moba players, they are accustomed to a high level of customization and a low level of balance. By contrast moba players are accustomed to a low level of customization and a high level of balance.

Balance and customization cannot co-exist, they have an inverse relationship with eachother. Moba games have many heroes/champions/gods but each individual hero has a limited pool of capabilities. Itemization provides low customizability, but the base capabilities remain intact. Furthermore, each hero has a access to much fewer active skill CDs at any given time. This encourages strategic use of CDs and not “wasting” CDs and making yourself vulnerable. But, at same the time each CD is much more impactful and can change the team fight dynamics extensively if used properly.

Health is a much more valueable resource in mobas because of the lack of access to heals, lack of a downed state and low access to damage immunity from dodges/invul/block. This encourages very strategic play and heavy consideration about positioning.

By contrast you have GW2 where a majority of skills are macro spammed when they come off cooldown. You get hurt, but you heal back up reducing the impact of any damage you have taken.

The two factors of spamminess and high sustain feed off eachother. You have high sustain, therefore players have to throw a slew of non-stop CDs at you. You have a slew of non-stop CDs therefore players have to have high sustain.

Mmo players should be familiar with this setup, but by no means is this e-sport material. Again, given that a large portion of GW2 playerbase is made up of mmorpg players this makes sense.

Thanks for this, this is a really good post. Like you said, simplification leads to balance.

When you look at the magic the gathering card game, although the game is complex the only way they are able to balance tournaments is by banner a large number of cards and abilities from actual tournament use. In the act of doing this to simplify things, balance is achieved.

To obtain balance Guildwars needs to simplify. Distinct roles, tells for high powered skills, a limited pool of abilities to choose from.

MMO players require a high level of customization, more skills, and a large number of stats to crunch. Without this they get bored easily.

I think the MMO nature of Guildwars and ESports are at odds with each other.

Well, from what I saw Dark Souls pvp is pretty balanced if you don’t count backstab easiness and a pair of spells.

And Dark souls is a game where every weapon is unique, you can build for anything you want and can choose a wide array of weapons and skills

I don’t know how that would fare in more than 1v1, but IMHO it’s also fun to watch. I mean… most of the fight build up a lot of suspence.

Oh you silly ppl as Blu said in a interview the devs never said that they will make this game esports…They said that they will make it as soon as they put spec mode and custom arenas in….
You think that they would say such a thing just to attract ppl that want to have a decent pvp game and they dont like MOBAS much?

go to 2:07

Is something that they are really focused on…Thats what i heard and that was a reason why i bought this game….
So seeing where we are today is really makes me feel kinda disapointed

And to be honest i liked that bald guy, its nothing personal…But Anet must consider what they have said and must take responsibilities and not hide behind “soon” and “things will get better in the future”..

hello kitty online is esport. Let’s all play that amazin[ING] game

Why should they even try at this point. It’s obvious this game will never be an esport or even a respectable pvp experience. They made WAY too many kittenty design decisions early on that would require a massive overhaul, they ignored pvp for over a year and all the top competitive players left, and even their most recent “balance” patches have been remarkebly tone deaf and just flat out incompetent. It’d probably be better for them to just take all the idiotic gimmick crap they’ve thrown in to the extreme and just full out cater the game to simpletons now.

The fact that GW2 is an MMO automatically killed any chances it had to become E-sports worthy. I have no idea why anyone thought it had potential with 8 different classes, 40 different trait-lines, countless skills, etc. It is literally impossible to balance such a thing, you’re always going to have at a list of different things that are crazy overpowered or underpowered.

WoW is the only MMO that reached E-Sports and ONLY because Blizzard literally forced it in with their endless reserves of money and 12 million+ subscriber base (at the time). Despite that it lasted less than a year in pro-gaming tournaments.

I don’t think GW2 is currently pursuing e-sports for the PvP of the game.
The game never was an e-sport / will never be (IMO).

ANet just needs to keep focusing on:
-balance
-new game modes
-making the combat more fun/active
-getting rewards in the right place

Serdoc.7261:

ANet just needs to keep focusing on:
-balance
-new game modes

FTFY

If it is balanced it is fun, competitive and interesting to watch. Those two go hand in hand. Ingame rewards mean nothing to professional gamers. If they get good viewership on their twitch they are able to pad their income, but again viewership comes from having a competitive game that is interesting to watch.

I think the whole esports thing should be set aside for the moment as Anet really needs to focus on balance and redoing/creating the game modes that will make it an esport. With conquest being the only game mode at the moment, it’s clear that this game mode is not meant for esports. The combat is too fast paced and the map objectives make it really hard to watch. Particle effects are too kitten the eyes and make it really hard to watch the actually battles. Shoutcasters are talking so fast to keep pace of the match that I just end up muting the whole thing. Slow down the pace of the game and create more meaningful map mechanics so that viewers can see the match progress in the sense that the team as a whole is working towards a goal instead of players playing for themselves.

I also feel that part of the problem is how Anet tries to make every profession capable of doing everything. It sounded like a great idea at the time, but over the last year, condi spamming is out of control and bunkers are a requirement in every team comp and there’s no way to win without one.

I think new game modes might allow Anet to become esports, but they have to go from a checkers game to actual chess. Every move a player or team makes has to be calculated like it is in Dota and Lol because while combat is fun to watch, most of the excitement comes from successfully overcoming a map objective (like taking down a tower) or making an important kill (a kill in spvp doesn’t hurt as much as it does in mobas).

tldr:
Focus on balance or reworking the professions to have a specialty and create new game modes where one might potentially be the new esports map.

When is the last time Anet said, “We are making these changes for E-Sports”? One could loosely relate that comment to them allowing spectating, which would allow for streaming. They do encourage streaming and tournaments, as I think any game developer would, but that is not a direct translation to “We are working for E-Sports.”

Guess I am saying, I don’t think anyone at NCSoft is telling the PVP design teams at Anet that the work put into the game is geared for an E-Sports goal versus an over all player enjoyment goal. In my opinion, its the community that clamors onto this E-Sports idea more than Anet.

if they supported GvG’s 6 months ago when the scene exploded, instead of kittening on it, this game would have been an esport by now. unlike anything else in this game, GvG’s were grassroots. people loved watching it, and it was easy to cast.

they chose to shove capture points down our throats for over a year. /sigh

mistsim.2748:

if they supported GvG’s 6 months ago when the scene exploded, instead of kittening on it, this game would have been an esport by now.

You mean zerg v zerg? Right….

RoRo.8270:

mistsim.2748:

if they supported GvG’s 6 months ago when the scene exploded, instead of kittening on it, this game would have been an esport by now.

You mean zerg v zerg? Right….

You clearly have no idea what a GvG is

style.6173:

RoRo.8270:

mistsim.2748:

if they supported GvG’s 6 months ago when the scene exploded, instead of kittening on it, this game would have been an esport by now.

You mean zerg v zerg? Right….

You clearly have no idea what a GvG is

It’s funny because I’ve heard some non-GW2 players say “hmm, don’t see any mention of Guilds vs Guilds…isn’t the game called Guild Wars?”.

Definitely needs to stop pursuing Esports, no mmo has ever been successful in Esports and it won’t change for gw2, they should instead of balance the game and make it more fun, add new game mods comes first in the list and it goes on.

Wintel.4873:

The fact that GW2 is an MMO automatically killed any chances it had to become E-sports worthy. I have no idea why anyone thought it had potential with 8 different classes, 40 different trait-lines, countless skills, etc. It is literally impossible to balance such a thing, you’re always going to have at a list of different things that are crazy overpowered or underpowered.

LoL has 117 champions each with 4 unique skills, hundreds of items, dozens of runes/masteries, and is the most successful esport out. Balance isn’t the issue GW2 has with becoming an esport, the issue is pretty much everything else about GW2 PvP.

Acandis.3250:

#BelieveInGrouch

You do have to keep in mind, new MMOs are going to be coming out soon.

GW2 has barely stabilized when any decent game would have thrived.
Next to no PvP MMO competition, millions of copies sold and legions of fanboys in beta… with a B2P model.
That is a dream come true for any MMO.

Yet.
GW2 is getting up to 7min ques in the more peak hours, ques where everyone is matched regardless of rank, synced through all NA…
Imagine what it’ll be like when there is actual competition…

I don’t think this game will have players in the 7-10 months needed to bring around a better-than-beta quality to GW2.
If Anet can even manage that in 7-10 months.

PVStar.3658:

Wintel.4873:

The fact that GW2 is an MMO automatically killed any chances it had to become E-sports worthy. I have no idea why anyone thought it had potential with 8 different classes, 40 different trait-lines, countless skills, etc. It is literally impossible to balance such a thing, you’re always going to have at a list of different things that are crazy overpowered or underpowered.

LoL has 117 champions each with 4 unique skills, hundreds of items, dozens of runes/masteries, and is the most successful esport out. Balance isn’t the issue GW2 has with becoming an esport, the issue is pretty much everything else about GW2 PvP.

Read what I wrote above. LoL has many champions but each champion has a unique and predictable kit. Each champion is easy to balance individually. In GW2 you have weapon swap, utility skills, toolkits, and traits. 1) It’s difficult to balance, 2) there is a non-stop stream of (low-impact) cooldowns available whereas in LoL you have to carefully consider where and when to use your few cooldowns.

nice to hear someone else say that Geff. I personally been preaching this since beta, there were a few other game reviewers that said pretty much the same thing…though they were a bit more brutal into breaking down every aspect of where the foundation for a competitive game were messed up in the design. (rng on abilities being a huge red flag to this).

Unfortunatly the amount of work it would take to get it into a healthy state is incredibly far off.

Unrealistic solutions if this game was remade from scratch as a pvp only focused title would include.

1. Limiting rune/sigils to only a few at max, with high impact on a core set of play style strengths. (if they were ported over at all)
2. Limiting amulet stats to 1 spread of stats to every character (aka, there would be no amulet)
3. Similar to where WoW had to finally go in the attempt to make things balance, professions would be better broke down into a few clearly defined play styles. Examp: tanky/turret eng, buffer/medgun support eng, hard hitting control shotgun eng, etc. This would be a chosen path with appropriate stats for the play style, with limited Major rune choices for limited customization to that play style, to allow for flexibility in map types.
4. game mode that actually encourages multiple class roles. Right now the “hold the point” style is very stale for roles vs mobas that are designed so you need a multitude of roles for different objectives and the eventual 5v5 team fights that come mid/late game. (“Heroes of the storm” pretty much lays out what guild wars 2 pvp shoulda been)
5. Create combat that is a bit less “spammy”. A energy resource tied into all abilities would be one way to solve the issue, or just simply fewer short cd abilities.
6. Downed state removed or heavily redesigned.
7. Out of combat regen removed. It encourages a lot of hit and run tactics that are boring to watch, and also removes a lot of risk to combat. Also self heals longer cd’s across the board.

These are some changes I would have made, that would at least give some customization without throwing the game to the wolves like they did where any kind of predictable balance is incredibly impossible to achieve.

I guarantee if they had released the game with the changes I listed above, this game would be immensely more popular, even if things weren’t 100% polished…or even perfectly balanced. (no moba is…yet they’re still incredibly popular, suppose they’re just balanced enough).

But at the ROOT of the problem, you have the fact this game was NOT designed to be a pvp game. Creating an amazing PVE mmo with some pvp was the goal. When making spvp, the head of development did not hire people initially with expertise at making competitive pvp games, nor did they give appropriate resources to it. It cant be blamed, it was obviously not the primary goal of the game, and it will never be. For the spvp game to have succeeded, it needed an entire team devoted to making a good pvp game…not a pvp game for an mmo. This is the biggest difference from spvp for guild wars 2, and any major pvp title. Like “LoL”…it is simply a pvp game. That is their only focus.

No esports unless pvp becomes free to play. There aren’t enough players.

No.

Pursue more game modes even more so than balance then we’ll talk!

All is vain!

Acandis.3250:

I don’t believe there is any focus on esports currently. We have finally gotten into the start of crafting a roadmap to where we can get the game balanced enough so that it’ll be fun to play, but I think it’s at least 7-10 months away from being there—because of how ducked up things got over the past 7 months.

Once that is done, or at least in a better place, we can start thinking about esports again. Until then, player/community run tournaments will have to do.

#BelieveInGrouch

Exactly this. The forums are obsessed with esports, but that’s about it.

The game launched a bit too early on the pvp side and some core features just hadn’t been made yet. If that fact makes people feel cheated, wronged, or whatever, they need to find a different game—probably one that has been out for 4+ years.

lordhelmos.7623:

Geff.1930:

As a MOBA player I can tell you that this game will not be as balanced and as competitive as esport games unless the devs redesign the game’s systems from the ground up with a focus on balance. That will not happen because a large portion of GW2’s players are mmorpg players not moba players, they are accustomed to a high level of customization and a low level of balance. By contrast moba players are accustomed to a low level of customization and a high level of balance.

Balance and customization cannot co-exist, they have an inverse relationship with eachother. Moba games have many heroes/champions/gods but each individual hero has a limited pool of capabilities. Itemization provides low customizability, but the base capabilities remain intact. Furthermore, each hero has a access to much fewer active skill CDs at any given time. This encourages strategic use of CDs and not “wasting” CDs and making yourself vulnerable. But, at same the time each CD is much more impactful and can change the team fight dynamics extensively if used properly.

Health is a much more valueable resource in mobas because of the lack of access to heals, lack of a downed state and low access to damage immunity from dodges/invul/block. This encourages very strategic play and heavy consideration about positioning.

By contrast you have GW2 where a majority of skills are macro spammed when they come off cooldown. You get hurt, but you heal back up reducing the impact of any damage you have taken.

The two factors of spamminess and high sustain feed off eachother. You have high sustain, therefore players have to throw a slew of non-stop CDs at you. You have a slew of non-stop CDs therefore players have to have high sustain.

Mmo players should be familiar with this setup, but by no means is this e-sport material. Again, given that a large portion of GW2 playerbase is made up of mmorpg players this makes sense.

To obtain balance Guildwars needs to simplify. Distinct roles, tells for high powered skills, a limited pool of abilities to choose from.

MMO players require a high level of customization, more skills, and a large number of stats to crunch. Without this they get bored easily.

I think the MMO nature of Guildwars and ESports are at odds with each other.

I’m glad that I came to the thread and a couple people had already said what I’d planned to, but better.

I feel that while it’s perfectly possible for the devs to create fun and competitively interesting PvP in GW2, it’s specifically the watchability for spectators that’s at odds with the “MMO nature” of the game. Closest example that I can think of is Smite, a MOBA with an MMO style hotbar and 3rd person view. Despite every character being limited to 4 skills, an auto-attack, and 2 actives (all of them have to be aimed, including the autos. No tab-targeting.), it STILL gets somewhat hard to follow as a spectator during the team fights. Since each character in GW2 has 15+ skills, runes and sigils that occasionally have their own animations/attacks, ect. There’s a hard upper limit on how visually uncluttered the devs can make the game without removing vital tells that players need just to know what skill is being used against them.

The problem that I see is that saying “GW2 needs to simplify” is easier said than done. If anything, there’s a bunch aspects where I feel that GW2 needs to get MORE visually complex in order to be fulfilling on a competitive level; skills such as Necro staff 2-5, the entirety of the Enge’s Bomb and ‘Nade kit skills, the ele’s diamond skin, ect. should have more distinct animations so players have a better idea of what to react to… but that is at odds with making the game more visually clean so that spectators have an easy time watching.

I started out with high expectations, but at this point, I’m skeptical that E-sports can be done justice on an MMO platform, for reasons you guys already covered.

no it should not – first year showed arenanet fail hard with balancing and i dont have any hope in this team anymore

they should finally start to go for fun >esport because its an mmo

Zinwrath.2049:

nice to hear someone else say that Geff. I personally been preaching this since beta, there were a few other game reviewers that said pretty much the same thing…though they were a bit more brutal into breaking down every aspect of where the foundation for a competitive game were messed up in the design. (rng on abilities being a huge red flag to this).

Unfortunatly the amount of work it would take to get it into a healthy state is incredibly far off.

Unrealistic solutions if this game was remade from scratch as a pvp only focused title would include.

1. Limiting rune/sigils to only a few at max, with high impact on a core set of play style strengths. (if they were ported over at all)
2. Limiting amulet stats to 1 spread of stats to every character (aka, there would be no amulet)
3. Similar to where WoW had to finally go in the attempt to make things balance, professions would be better broke down into a few clearly defined play styles. Examp: tanky/turret eng, buffer/medgun support eng, hard hitting control shotgun eng, etc. This would be a chosen path with appropriate stats for the play style, with limited Major rune choices for limited customization to that play style, to allow for flexibility in map types.
4. game mode that actually encourages multiple class roles. Right now the “hold the point” style is very stale for roles vs mobas that are designed so you need a multitude of roles for different objectives and the eventual 5v5 team fights that come mid/late game. (“Heroes of the storm” pretty much lays out what guild wars 2 pvp shoulda been)
5. Create combat that is a bit less “spammy”. A energy resource tied into all abilities would be one way to solve the issue, or just simply fewer short cd abilities.
6. Downed state removed or heavily redesigned.
7. Out of combat regen removed. It encourages a lot of hit and run tactics that are boring to watch, and also removes a lot of risk to combat. Also self heals longer cd’s across the board.

These are some changes I would have made, that would at least give some customization without throwing the game to the wolves like they did where any kind of predictable balance is incredibly impossible to achieve.

I guarantee if they had released the game with the changes I listed above, this game would be immensely more popular, even if things weren’t 100% polished…or even perfectly balanced. (no moba is…yet they’re still incredibly popular, suppose they’re just balanced enough).

But at the ROOT of the problem, you have the fact this game was NOT designed to be a pvp game. Creating an amazing PVE mmo with some pvp was the goal. When making spvp, the head of development did not hire people initially with expertise at making competitive pvp games, nor did they give appropriate resources to it. It cant be blamed, it was obviously not the primary goal of the game, and it will never be. For the spvp game to have succeeded, it needed an entire team devoted to making a good pvp game…not a pvp game for an mmo. This is the biggest difference from spvp for guild wars 2, and any major pvp title. Like “LoL”…it is simply a pvp game. That is their only focus.

+1

A lot of good ideas here. Especially the removal of out of combat regen. Maybe they can create a team controlled heal node like Smite’s arena, but it can only heal for a set amount before the the node has to recharge.

Specialized roles are what teams are made of, but class/role specialization is based on map objectives, so if the only game mode is conquest, then bunkers are the only required specialization. Like I said before, with Anet trying to let every class do every thing (although some do it better than others), there will be no balance. The rock paper scissors approach will create better game balance as a whole rather than trying to balance 1v1 because this is a team game first and foremost. If you build for CC, then you shouldn’t be able to kill a bunker, but you can keep them locked down with well timed interrupts for a teammate to attempt the kill, etc.

No.
I’ve wanted this to happen for a long time, but now it’s too late.
I think the approach to merge PvE and PvP is the best solution for Anet. They realized it’s too late to create a competitive scene, so they would rather have the current playerbase spread across all game-types.
It’s a shame, and sometimes I wish it did not have to be this way, but again there are already other great competitive games out there.
For the moment I’ll probably stop playing sPvP at all, since I don’t really like the meta, but if the meta was changed I might come back to play casually. For the game to be competitive/esport it would need pretty much a revamp, which is never going to happen, and I believe I can say that with certainty.

OMG, OP said Huttball!

huttball huttball huttball huttball

1000x pls o pls o pls o pls o pls o pls

Silentsins.3726:

I feel that while it’s perfectly possible for the devs to create fun and competitively interesting PvP in GW2, it’s specifically the watchability for spectators that’s at odds with the “MMO nature” of the game. Closest example that I can think of is Smite, a MOBA with an MMO style hotbar and 3rd person view. Despite every character being limited to 4 skills, an auto-attack, and 2 actives (all of them have to be aimed, including the autos. No tab-targeting.), it STILL gets somewhat hard to follow as a spectator during the team fights. Since each character in GW2 has 15+ skills, runes and sigils that occasionally have their own animations/attacks, ect. There’s a hard upper limit on how visually uncluttered the devs can make the game without removing vital tells that players need just to know what skill is being used against them.

I disagree completely about spectator-ing in SMITE. If you are completely new to the game some level of confusion is to be expected, but if you have played for about a month you will know exactly what each God’s kit is and have an implicit idea about what cooldowns have been used and what cooldowns are available to the players. As a player you know when a Neith’s backflip is available for instance, or when an Ares or a Poseidon’s Ulti is available so that you realize the risks and benefits of engaging at particular moments. This knowledge gets transferred over as a viewer or a shoutcaster, you know that if someone has used his beads CD and the enemy has an Ares on their team that the person will try to play defensively to avoid getting caught by Ares. Or you know that if a Neith has used her backflip it is the perfect time to focus her if she is in a bad spot.

The same level of forethought and strategy simply does not exist in this game. The balance devs come from mmorpg mindset where you macro spam spam spam your abilities until one of you dies. Furthermore, the element of prediction is diminished by weapon swap and utilities. If you see a Warrior with a GS for instance, you know his kit right off the bat, this is good, this is how it should be, but then you add to the mix weapon swap, a variety of heals to choose from and a large number of utilities and elites and you are now faced with limitless permutations.

Note again, I feel like I’m repeating myself here: Because there are so many skills each skill’s impact has to be marginalized to compensate. This is done with a high level of damage immunity sources and heals. Heals and damage immunities in turn have to be marginalized by a high level of skill spam.

jimmyimo.2089:

It is not possible to have other game modes without dedicated healers.

No.
There aren’t dedicated healers in LoL.

jimmyimo.2089:

You need to split up the fight otherwise it becomes a gigantic spam festival and completely random nonsense.

Getting warmer.
The things that throws out most generic map ideas is the shear chaos of it all.
GW2 is terribly telegraphed with no team dynamic.
That makes fights larger than 2v2s really, really messy.

But that obviously doesn’t mean conquest is the only possible game mode.
Like no way in hell.

Off the top of my head…
Make the map into a decently large circle.
Make it a 4v4.
Add tons of terrain (walls/gorges/exc.) to break up the fighting and get rid of enemy markers on the map.
Add scattered powerups (deal more dmg but take a bit more, exc).
Add monsters to opposite edges of it, one owned by each team (killing it gives everyone on your team a buff where they auto rez the next time they are downed).

Bam.
Selfish stuff for the solo-Q heroes (buffs).
Teamwork for those who want it (killing the beast and ganking around corners).
Constant action and suspense (ganks/not sure where enemies are) yet not constant clusterkittens.
People would downright love that.