Guild Wars 2

I’ll format it up onto the forums shortly, but here’s a link to the post: Never Settling Down: Solving sPvP Balance by Constantly Changing It

TL;DR,
Regardless of the high-profile World Tournament Series, the updates to matchmaking*, and the balance update that went live 3 days ago, structured PvP is extremely static (the past 3 days excepted, it’s the first balance update in 2 months). And static for PvP creates a feeling of staleness.

*Seriously, thank you Justin O’Dell and your entire team for overhauling it, even if there are kinks in the works still. The levers exist to get them out.

This is downright terrible for several reasons that I’ll get into shortly, the chief one being stale content bores people, and people stop playing boring stuff.

The root cause of this staleness is the meta. More specifically, the static nature of the meta. Except for the immediate aftermath of a balance patch, things settle into the expected meta builds, and a bunch of outlier builds that get trashed 90% of the time by people playing meta.

Players can change the meta, but they are slow to do so. The chief driver of meta changes is balance updates, which is something that Guild Wars 2 has rarely, both compared to other eSports-level games and its own predecessor Guild Wars.

The lack of regular balance updates has bred a culture of mockery around putting “eSports” in the same sentence with “Guild Wars 2.”

A competitive game aspiring to be considered an eSport needs regular, meta-changing balance updates.

This becomes even more true with the upcoming addition of more traits and skills through specializations and the Revenant in Heart of Thorns.

That’s what they did in Guild Wars 1:

Played endless Whack a mole with skills for no other reason than PvPers got bored every few months.

PvE players hated it.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have hundreds of skills that you can pick and choose from and trait or gear changes are subtle. I’d prefer that development resources instead got spend on at least two more stronghold maps, and other game related content.

nekretaal.6485:

That’s what they did in Guild Wars 1:

Played endless Whack a mole with skills for no other reason than PvPers got bored every few months.

PvE players hated it.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have hundreds of skills that you can pick and choose from and trait or gear changes are subtle. I’d prefer that development resources instead got spend on at least two more stronghold maps, and other game related content.

Moar skills, moar specializations. Anet, please!!!

ArenaNet has actually taken the thought to get rid of some of the primary causers of the skill-mess-jumble-balancepocalypse GW1 became.

For one, specializations will be exclusive within themselves. Traits and skills locked away from the “base” class, and tweakable within that little box.

For two, reducing the sheer fluidity of things. In GW1 you could slot any 8 skills as long as they were in your primary or secondary profession. In GW2, that is limited between the profession-specific mechanic, the locked weapon skills, a handful of utilities, and a very small collection of elites.

The real complexity is in gear and traits, which is where I think ANet needs to direct their attention.

I completely agree with you, OP. Back when Izzy was in charge of skill balance in GW1 he openly admitted that some of their balance changes were to shake things up and encourage build variation, not simply to nerf builds that were genuinely overpowered. That’s why whenever something became the best, most efficient build for something they would either hit it, or buff something that countered it. Not because it was OP, or because people complained about it, but JUST BECAUSE!
This isn’t Quake or Unreal Tournament: you’ll never achieve the perfectly level playing field of 2 identical players with identical sets of weapons. This is an RPG! Imbalance is inherently built into the game! Build X will always have an advantage over build Y, which in turn will completely counter build Z etc. Once the most powerful and efficient versions of each of these are discovered and get onto metabattle, that’s all anyone will ever be running. Not only does this get boring, but it also exacerbates the inherent imbalances by allowing people the time to find the most perfect build of X to most efficiently counter Y! So the imbalances get harder and harder, making it even more necessary for people to run the most efficient build of their profession.

Frequent minor rebalancing keeps the meta from stabilising, because people haven’t found the most efficient version of everything. (I’m not just talking about “which is better, d/d ele or staff ele?”, but even down to minor details like “which Earth adept trait is best for d/d ele?”) And when people are still experimenting, you get a lot more build variations running around, which in turn keeps people honest and prevents a build up of the kind of class-stacking cheese we see in the meta these days. Because many of the variant builds we see running around will be sub-par and inefficient, but each of them will pack some marginal utility that has the potential to destroy a team that just picked 5 of the most powerful build in the meta and ran with it.

This is established wisdom which game balancers are well aware of (including people who used to do game balancing and still work at ANet!), but for some reason the people running GW2 think their game is exempt from all the rules. And yet they’re breaking some of the rules they themselves wrote. In the GW2 manifesto Mike O’Brien wrote

So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral.

(emphasis mine)
How are we expected to feel like we’re making creative choices when, not only have the most efficient classes for pvp been the same since last April, but even the most efficient builds for each of those classes are known and well-established?

Morwath.9817:

nekretaal.6485:

That’s what they did in Guild Wars 1:

Played endless Whack a mole with skills for no other reason than PvPers got bored every few months.

PvE players hated it.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have hundreds of skills that you can pick and choose from and trait or gear changes are subtle. I’d prefer that development resources instead got spend on at least two more stronghold maps, and other game related content.

Moar skills, moar specializations. Anet, please!!!

I think that’s basically the idea. These specializations will be the first, but I’d expect another set of them within 8 months after the expansions launch. I could see each class eventually having 4 specializations in three or four years.

The article linked by the OP and his addendum seem to frame their argument poorly or have it backwards. Yes, we need balance updates more often, but balance updates should not be done solely to shake up the meta. Balance updates should aim to create more dynamic metagame than the previous iteration by providing a larger amount of choices – not preserving the quantity but changing what the choices are.

The “Extra Credits” video on “Perfect Imbalance” which was linked in the article does a much better job of explaining healthy balance, and touches on some of the issues that GW2 has. In a healthy system, there may be some imbalances, but they’re kept close to a “perfect balance”. The minor imbalances should also have pros and cons to keep player habits changing. Where GW2 is struggling is that there are a few things which have drifted too far above the margin and many things which are too far below it.

Prior to the latest patch, d/d ele was strong, but it also has almost no viable weaknesses or counters. To paraphrase “Extra Credits” Tip #1: you can’t have a build that does everything well. Reigning in the power of d/d ele by reducing its damage output allows for some weaknesses or alternatives to possibly emerge. Sure, d/d ele may still survive forever in most 1v1s on a point, but after the patch (in theory) it can’t win those 1v1’s either – only stalemate. That allows for possible alternatives that may not have the survivability, but, can win given certain conditions. For example, maybe a build can win the 1v1s, but can’t survive on-point; it has to give up control in order to win.

The logic for more frequent updates is that when outliers, who have no viable counter or alternative, dominate for too long, the game becomes repetitive and boring. Games which are repetitive and boring lose players’ interest.