Guild Wars 2

I have worked on and off in the industry for over a decade. I come from a competitive FPS background and worked on the Halo 4 multiplayer team. I have played MMO PVP on three different titles. GW2 is BY far my favorite and most interesting.

Right now I’m slugging it out in ranked everyday, purely Puging with no guild. Somehow I have managed to be in the top 150 players. Here are some non QQ suggestions on how things can improve:

1. Remove profession dailies-
These really mess up match balance. It is no fun to have 5 rangers or 5 thieves running around Conquest. Replace it with: Daily Capper, Daily reviver, etc.

2. Remove Celestial Amulet-
It’s pretty OP, and highly used. No amulet should give +432 to all stats, it just seems lame. This would promote build diversity, which is sorely needed.

3. Build Saver-
Unless the intended design purpose is to have everyone use Metabattle, then please let us save PVP builds. This promotes in game adaptation to the teams composition. You can edit your build in pre-game, but it would be nice to quickly choose your already saved build.

4. Advertise that Ready Up reduces the pre-game timer-
I spend upwards to 5-7 minutes for queues to pop, when I load into a map, I am eager to start. It’s insane how many people do not know that Ready Up eliminates the count down.

5. VOIP, yes we want it-
I came from a year in Neverwinter PVP (great combat system, P2W ruins it); and VOIP in game is there, with no need for TS (teamspeak). It does wonders for Puggers.

6. get PVE’rs out of ranked-
yes it sounds a bit elitist but as it stands I cannot stress how many matches I get someone in team chat saying, “Here for dailies, srry if I suk.” It’s disrespectful to the PVP community. I wouldn’t leave the mists and try to jump in some Dungeon Runs, because I know I suck at PVE and don’t know the Dungeons; in essence I would burden my team more than help. Which segways into this next suggestion:

7. Display your MMR and make RANKED have a minimum MMR-
Earn your keep by playing unranked. Other MMO’s require GS (Gear Score) to complete high end content. If you want to compete in ranked, you should have to earn the privilege.

8. Want to attract a higher PVP populace? Create a precurser reward track-
Forget RNG or the Toilet, A LOT of people would come for the precursor. Make it double the length, hell triple the length of current reward tracks, and make it unlocked ONLY after Dragon ranked is obtained and only available based on Ranked games played

9. Penalty for quitters-
Sorry those who cry, ’Mah innerwebs sux and I DQ all the time!" Well you should stay out of Ranked then, because you are a burden to your team and unreliable.

Let the debate begin. =)

Position on this leaderboard doesn’t mean much other than you play a lot.

My Replies to OP
1. Profession daily is bad, but not necessarily because of how it influence ranked games (see response #6). Suggest grouping them into Soldier, Adventurer, and Scholar win dailies and adding a “ranked winner” daily.

2. Celestial amulet is fine. A few builds which use it are the problem. Removing the amulet would do nothing to promote build diversity. You would just see a new meta emerge.

3. Build Templates are nice and would be extremely beneficial. The problem is limited human resources with other tasks taking priority (even PvP ones).

4. The 1.5 minute wait time is provided to allow players to change builds, etc. Reducing that time to ~30sec would be ideal, but you need to address build/character swapping before the match starts (should it be allowed?).

5. Another question of human resources. As a counter to your story, WoW delayed a patch(es) for months to implement in-game VoIP and even after years of being available is still almost never used.

6. No need. If rating and matchmaking are working properly, then inexperienced players will be matched with/against players of similar skill.

7. See response to #6

8. This idea is of questionable merit. If you’ve learned anything in the game industry, especially MMORPGs, it’s that players will find the fastest path to a reward that has the least effort. Put in a precursor track and watch the bots materialize en masse.

9. There is a penalty for leaving the match (assuming it’s not turned off because it’s bugged again). There’s also a grace period for players who do DC, as there should be. You could argue that the grace period needs adjusted, but not removed.

My Suggestions
1. Leaderboards must reflect skill (rating) over amount of games played. A hybrid system (more points for matches at higher rating) is also acceptable. A good decay algorithm would also be nice.

2. Balance updates need to happen more often. Recommend every two months; enough time to kitten if something is actually too strong, or if it was player overreaction and then develop and test a solution.

3. Reduce power of instant-cast effects which occur on top of base skills/attacks. Things like sigil procs, damage procs, instant healing, etc. Being hit with a few thousand damage for being hit with an auto-attack after avoiding the big attacks is silly.

4. Change the stat system to allow more build variety. Your choices are extreme damage, overly tanky, and celestial. Seriously, who needs 900 toughness with 0 vitality? Suggest splitting stats into Amulet/Ring/Ring at 50/25/25% of current amulet stats. I’ve seen quite a few players, especially WvW players, list the inability to use their PvE/WvW build in PvP as a reason they don’t like to play PvP. Even if their build is bad, still allow them to use it and find out that it’s bad.

5. Consider revising the rating and matchmaking system. The perception is that neither works as well as it should. From personal experience, I tend to get more bad games (blowouts or one player pulling you down) than competitive games.

6. Address the cesspool of hotjoin (practice). First, limit hot join rewards once you achieve a certain rank (moreso than current limits). This keeps more experienced players out of hotjoin unless they’re truly practicing and also curbs the appeal of reward farm servers. Second, cut down on auto-balance abuse. The auto-balance abuse and losing because you’re outnumbered is a huge turn-off for players. Possibly restrict players from joining the winning team unless the winning team is short players.

7. Consider combining Unranked and Ranked. A combined player pool would allow for improved matchmaking and reduce queue times. The downside is players being apprehensive about competing.

8. Build Templates. Even if it has to start with trait templates, it’s still helpful.

Position on LB actually doesn’t mean anything, since it’s a ‘test’.

Cele is OP. 3 out of 5 builds per MetaBattle use it, which means it is being used in tournies. The casual player uses it, and with some lucky button mashing, they are now owning. The trade off is nil, and the sustain it gives is stupid.

I never play anything but Ranked, so I can’t comment on hotjoin and unranked.

Time of day I have noticed determines the closeness of matches. I tend to get in closer games at night. Blowouts usually only happen on a dropout, or in the rare case of profession stacking. I actually quit a ranked game today because the other team had 4 rangers.

I guess we’re turning this into another thread about blind hatred of the celestial amulet…

Nathaniel.4905:

Cele is OP. 3 out of 5 builds per MetaBattle use it, which means it is being used in tournies.

Correlation != Causation. You see these builds often because they are strong. You still haven’t addressed the question of whether they are strong because of the celestial amulet or because of the build itself.

You also see a lot of the builds on the “great” list of metabattle in tournaments. They’re almost there, but being held back for some reason or another. Cele is used in 6/16 of the meta+great group. And even then, it’s still used only by three professions (engineer, ele, warrior).

Celestial amulet is fine; certain builds which use it are a little too good. The common theme of all those builds are

1. A way to compensate for the lower power value on celestial. Cele rifle goes 6 points into their power line. Warrior and Elementalist have multiple blast finishers to use with fire fields.
2. Easy access to generous amounts of burning applications and other conditions to use as damage or cover conditions.

The casual player uses it, and with some lucky button mashing, they are now owning. The trade off is nil, and the sustain it gives is stupid.

So what about medi guard and turret engi? Those two builds are far more friendly to new players and button mashing than d/d ele, celel rifle engi, and shoutbow warrior. By your logic, we should nerf zerker too and every amulet turret engis can possibly use.

Again, it’s a problem with the professions, not the stats they choose.

Cele staff elementalist is an example of a celestial build that isn’t considered to be OP by most. They have good defense – enough to not die 1v1 and survive for a while in a 1v2. However, they usually can’t kill anything by themselves either – at least not quickly. Funny thing is, they use a very similar set up to d/d ele other than weapons and a couple traits.