So, while waiting to download this game again, I read the blog by Evan Lesh and watched the last Ready Up. I’m still not privy to all the upcoming changes, but from what I gathered, I want to give my thoughts:
Transparency – I don’t know how transparent we’ll be, but it appears that we’re on our way. Just the fact that they are posting the inner workings of the new MMR and dishonor system is light years from where we were a year or two ago where everything was tight lipped and it felt as though ANET saw the community as privileged to be able to use this product, instead of an integral part of developing it.
Augmentation – Not for us, but for the game. It sounds like the programmers have worked tirelessly to create a system that can be adjusted on the fly. The way they spoke about it on Ready Up made it very apparent that this was a very non-configurable system before, which is a shame. No wonder why the smallest changes took light years; it appears every little slider was buried in a mountain of code.
Dishonor – The changes to Dishonor are more than welcome. At the time I took a break (February I think?) I was getting 4v5 matches more than I found acceptable. The system at the time did not give players a reason to think twice about leaving.
The only part that I’m cautious about is getting dishonor from denying a queue. Think about it what could happen. You could potentially have a player not wanting to get dishonor, so he hits ready. Either he’ll play poorly because he doesn’t want to be there, or he’ll just autorun into a wall (or macro jump). I’m not sure we should punish people for electing to pass. If we do punish them, I think it should be really minor. 3x less than flat out abandoning a match is too harsh (imo). It should be 6-8 times less.
Ranked Queues – I love the idea that there is no solo or team queue, now only ranked. I say this with one large caveat: the game successfully matching you with like groups and not against premades. If it’s successful and matches a solo player with another group of similar configuration, this will be the best change of all.
Stats info – It sounds as if we are in the infancy of finally getting some useful stats about our pvp history, match details at the end of games. I would love to see an in-depth look of damage done, healing done, deaths off point, etc. The previous stat information was borderline useless.
Anyway, that’s all I can think of now. I’m looking forward to being back and seeing some familiar faces (hopefully).
P.S. – I’m getting all of this from one 23 minute VOD and 1 blog, so please correct me if my optimism is misplaced.