Guild Wars 2

This topic has been brought up before.

I was watching some old streams of the PvP World Tournaments. As an experiment I brought my fiance in (who is an avid gamer who plays Smite and Couterstrike religiously) to spectate the game.

She has never watched a Gw2 game before and her synopsis was complete confusion. She complained about the particle effects obscuring all of the animations. Majority of people were using Asura characters so her comment was it looked like a “Chibi Smurf War.”

At one point, a Shoutbow warrior landed a final thrust and dropped a guy. She was like WTF just happened? The animation for the burst was so obscure she couldn’t figure out what was going on and why the guy died.

After about 10 minutes she got bored and wandered off to do something else. I wonder, how many other people watch tournaments and feel this way? How many are met with confusion and view the game as unappealing from a spectator standpoint because they can’t figure out what’s going on?

She complained to me that all she saw was “A kaleidoscope of disco lights spewing from every player and a ton of boring numbers popping up.” She couldn’t telegraph big hits or even figure out what people were doing. She seemed surprised when people died and kept asking me “How did that guy go down?”

Just something to take into account of how the game might look to a first timer from a spectator perspective. She never really got excited. It made me realize that the way the game is presented to outsiders and it’s not good.

This is exactly how I feel when I watch Counter Strike or Smite. Or a lot of games. (Albeit without particle effects.) I dunno wtf is going on so I get bored and switch to GW2 on twitch.

It is just generally true that without having knowledge of most things it will seem like random jibberish without context.

This is true for words.
This is true for pictures.
This is true for games. etc.

Nah, it isn’t the same thing. When a person is insta gibbed in a shooter, you know it was an explosive/knife/headshot. In mobas, the big hitters generally have some sort of build up (aka tells that allow for counterplay). You may not know exactly what the skill is called, but you know some kitten is going down. With GW2, you got medi guards, mesmers, and thieves all roflteleportstomping, shoutbow just screaming in circles over fire circles, etc.

Well…it’s not surprising at all that a game she doesn’t play is confusing to her.

This would really be the same case for any MMO out there.

Yeah this is what pvp is like to a new player for quite awhile. Abilities and animations happen very fast with no cast bars and each does multiple things, conditions and boons blink on and off constantly, health bars are tiny and dull and spell effects are big and spammy. A new player now will die over and over and have no idea why. Spectating is no easier.

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

Linnael.1069:

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

I don’t understand anything happening in any of the LoL streams. And that’s me being 100% honest.

PistolWhip.2697:

This is exactly how I feel when I watch Counter Strike or Smite. Or a lot of games. (Albeit without particle effects.) I dunno wtf is going on so I get bored and switch to GW2 on twitch.

It is just generally true that without having knowledge of most things it will seem like random jibberish without context.

This is true for words.
This is true for pictures.
This is true for games. etc.

^ This.
OP, you forget that people who already watch streams and tournament video games, have played the game prior and understood its mechanics previously.

Want me to tell you what American Football looks like to outsiders? I can make it sound very uninteresting.

Jasher.6580:

Linnael.1069:

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

I don’t understand anything happening in any of the LoL streams. And that’s me being 100% honest.

When i say “on a mechanical level” I mean very basically. When somebody dies, you can generally see that a huge axe was dropped on their head, or a big projectile just collided with them right? In GW2 it can feel like somebody just randomly falls over to an invisible hand after being totally fine with all the other giant flame particles that have been coming out him for the last 90 seconds.

Another factor if you’re watching streams rather than a friend’s screen is that pro games can admittedly get pretty crazy in terms of actions per second. Most players wont be able to register some of the burst combos, much less the viewers, and the shoutcasters at LCS aren’t going to be explaining basics the way some amateur streamers/regular players will.

I completely agree with OP. Honestly, even as a player I have a hard time telling what most opponents are even doing to me now. Everything has just gotten so unreasonably fast, and the only things that work are:
-Stacking as many instant and passive damage sources to kill people before they can react
- Stacking stupid amounts of sustain and just tank through everything.

There aren’t important things to dodge, there aren’t big telegraphs on enemy skills that you can say “gotta watch out for that,” there isn’t even a clear indication of where many effects come from (often it is passive traits). Everybody just follows a skill rotation that works in most situations, and whoever has the stronger rotation wins.

There was a time when important skills had big tells, and dodging intelligently was important. Now, everything just farts out instant bursts and damage that often the “big” hits aren’t even the main source of your incoming damage.

Playing and watching the game just isn’t fun, from a pvp-perspective. Things are too flashy, too fast, and not well telegraphed for people to understand.

But that is what happens when power creep cranks everything up to 11.

Saiyan.1704:

PistolWhip.2697:

This is exactly how I feel when I watch Counter Strike or Smite. Or a lot of games. (Albeit without particle effects.) I dunno wtf is going on so I get bored and switch to GW2 on twitch.

It is just generally true that without having knowledge of most things it will seem like random jibberish without context.

This is true for words.
This is true for pictures.
This is true for games. etc.

^ This.
OP, you forget that people who already watch streams and tournament video games, have played the game prior and understood its mechanics previously.

Want me to tell you what American Football looks like to outsiders? I can make it sound very uninteresting.

it’s just men running to each other so they can grope each other looking for a ball. then maybe then run over a line and I guess that’s good?

lordhelmos.7623:

She complained to me that all she saw was “A kaleidoscope of disco lights spewing from every player and a ton of boring numbers popping up.” She couldn’t telegraph big hits or even figure out what people were doing. She seemed surprised when people died and kept asking me “How did that guy go down?”

Funny i commented this on guild wars 2 video on youtube and i got bash by keyboard warriors.

SlayerSixx.5763:

With GW2, you got medi guards, mesmers, and thieves all roflteleportstomping, shoutbow just screaming in circles over fire circles, etc.

True pvping in GW2 needs 100% focus on your monitor but still i can’t see what’s is happening on my screen specially if there is necro , mesmer. like my guildmate told me look for the mesmers hands so you would know what skill he will cast next but the particle effects are blocking my view. And most skill in GW2 are instant cast.

Or balls, depending on what team you play for :P.

Well, if we’re talking GS for mesmers, mind stab and the wave are super hard to dodge, but the izerker and mirror blade are really easy to dodge. You don’t need procodsniper360mlg reaction speed to dodge the last two. Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can tone down/turn off particle effects.

Jasher.6580:

Linnael.1069:

Lopez.7369:

I also feel like this is true for every game. I would guess that 99 percent of spectators for any e-sport have played the game in some capacity before.

But it is true that too many of Guild Wars 2’s telegraphs are either too much or too little.

The reason big e-sports games get big is because they are well designed for spectators. Friends that have never played League of Legends will sit down and watch me play, and absolutely understand pretty much everything happening on a mechanical level with only a little explanation from me, or the shoutcaster if we’re watching a pro match. There’s just a massive problem with how animations and spell effects were implemented in this game. Not to even mention the “chibi smurf war” that is the natural result of one race having ridiculously impossible to read animations in PvP.

I don’t understand anything happening in any of the LoL streams. And that’s me being 100% honest.

I don’t play lol or dota 2 but i know what is happening if i watch it on youtube i just don’t know the skill names. If Anet wants this kind of damage they should have made the skills telegraph so players can dodge it or can read it like Earthshaker or Pin Down you can react well if you don’t it’s your fault not the game designer or the other player so if you lose it’s your skill as a player that needs improvement not the class that you are playing.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Or balls, depending on what team you play for :P.

Well, if we’re talking GS for mesmers, mind stab and the wave are super hard to dodge, but the izerker and mirror blade are really easy to dodge. You don’t need procodsniper360mlg reaction speed to dodge the last two. Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can tone down/turn off particle effects.

i don’t know the name i just know the animations but yeah i think i can tell if a mesmer is casting something on GS skill but other skills are hard to read.

The combat in gw2 is amazing but 3 years in, people have to accept that there are some core reasons why it is not popular.

What the op is talking about is one of those reasons, if not the main one.

I would personally like to see less effects, bigger/longer telegraphs, slower autos, and less fields overall.

Weaker autos would be interesting, to say the least. On my guard, generating 10+ stacks of might is easy. At around 15 stacks of might, I’m doing 4-5k autos. During those times, I wonder if using literally any other skill is worth the trouble. I’d seriously be interested in seeing how they get that done.

lordhelmos.7623:

This topic has been brought up before.

I was watching some old streams of the PvP World Tournaments. As an experiment I brought my fiance in (who is an avid gamer who plays Smite and Couterstrike religiously) to spectate the game.

She has never watched a Gw2 game before and her synopsis was complete confusion. She complained about the particle effects obscuring all of the animations. Majority of people were using Asura characters so her comment was it looked like a “Chibi Smurf War.”

At one point, a Shoutbow warrior landed a final thrust and dropped a guy. She was like WTF just happened? The animation for the burst was so obscure she couldn’t figure out what was going on and why the guy died.

After about 10 minutes she got bored and wandered off to do something else. I wonder, how many other people watch tournaments and feel this way? How many are met with confusion and view the game as unappealing from a spectator standpoint because they can’t figure out what’s going on?

She complained to me that all she saw was “A kaleidoscope of disco lights spewing from every player and a ton of boring numbers popping up.” She couldn’t telegraph big hits or even figure out what people were doing. She seemed surprised when people died and kept asking me “How did that guy go down?”

Just something to take into account of how the game might look to a first timer from a spectator perspective. She never really got excited. It made me realize that the way the game is presented to outsiders and it’s not good.

Esports require GW1 like casting bars.
This way even player with little to no knowledge about certain class would know what has happened… on top of that we need in-game spectate mode (like the GW1…) where you can watch recorded matches of top teams.

Looks the same to me as well. It is a kaleidoscope of disco lights spewing from every player. Experience only lets you determine what most of those lights mean.

This is true for any MMORPG. I’d even say that GW2 is actually easier to understand, as there’s “only” 10 skills for each character.

MMORPG isn’t a good genre to watch. PvP is even harder. From the camera perspective, to the mechanical complexity, to the visual cluster and everything else. Even castesr have problems to keep up with everything going on. kitten , the players in the match most of the times don’t pay attention all the combos going on in a big fight. Is a core problem of the genre and will never be fixed. To be a good game to watch, it has to be build with this is mind since the very start. And traditional MMORPGs are too deep for it.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Weaker autos would be interesting, to say the least. On my guard, generating 10+ stacks of might is easy. At around 15 stacks of might, I’m doing 4-5k autos. During those times, I wonder if using literally any other skill is worth the trouble. I’d seriously be interested in seeing how they get that done.

It was actually discussed a lot at the start of the game. Autos do so much damage, buffed by passives, that “skill shots” cease to exist.

Combo fields are another problem. The game just spams so much of everything on short durations. The opposite would make it so much more spectator friendly.

Eg you can only do a fire field once per minute, but fire shield lasts like 15 seconds…

@OP: you spoke about watching older streams. Before or after the patch?

I don’t like watching GW2 at all. The pvp is just extremely boring (also mostly because of the conquest. But even watching stronghold was boting)
WvW is quite nice to watch because you can at least see the dynamics. You don’t need to know skills or anything. But you can see melee train, spikes, fakes, regroups. You see the action.

Look at some nice gvg or hero’s ascend matches from gw1.they are fun to watch.

Jasher.6580:

I don’t understand anything happening in any of the LoL streams. And that’s me being 100% honest.

I totally agree. I just know, that they killed someone with their abilities, but I have no clue what the ability does.

But the main difference between those games and gw2 is the following:
Most of the time, there is 1 single thing going on.
First the lanes are farming, till one of the junglers jump in → you watch, and maybe he get’s the kill or not (= interesting). It builds up to that moment.
Then you have big fight, either someone get’s killed and the move forward, or they have to back off.

GW2 is different. Multiple fight all over the map are happening at the same time.

I’ve brought this topic up in multiple threads/posts and there could be some pretty easy fixes to make the game easier to spectate, but there should also be major overhauls of some things:

Easy fixes:

- Stronger teamcolors on outfits and on the minimap.
- Only finishers are the standard ones that don’t obscure the fight for multiple seconds
- no backpacks/wings and show the chars in the PvP-mode, where they are all big enough size with outfit specific to the class.

Bigger changes:
- Go over every skill/trait-effects and just cut everything in terms of particle effects that isn’t absolutely necessary to see what the skill does and which skill was used. There are tons of effects that just clutter everything up and that do more in terms of making the game confusing rather than helping spectators and players to identify whats happening.

Saiyan.1704:

PistolWhip.2697:

This is exactly how I feel when I watch Counter Strike or Smite. Or a lot of games. (Albeit without particle effects.) I dunno wtf is going on so I get bored and switch to GW2 on twitch.

It is just generally true that without having knowledge of most things it will seem like random jibberish without context.

This is true for words.
This is true for pictures.
This is true for games. etc.

^ This.
OP, you forget that people who already watch streams and tournament video games, have played the game prior and understood its mechanics previously.

Want me to tell you what American Football looks like to outsiders? I can make it sound very uninteresting.

Well, actually if you see pro twitch streams seems like even them have trouble seeing what the enemy is doing. If you watch closely, you’ll find many situations where they waste a cooldown on a block or an invuln. The game is hard to see even for pros. XD

I think one of the reasons why is that when you pvp you have to focus at the centre of the screen, away from your status bar and the enemy one.

“But it was like that in all MMOs” you might say.
True, that is why all the people playing MMOs that allowed addons used tons of them just to make the interface more readable.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can tone down/turn off particle effects.

The problem is – you cannot.

Shaders settings can reduce some effects on armour, but combat itself will remain clustered with effects.

Having a hard time in GW2 PvP?

http://i.imgur.com/3khiHwP.gif

GW2 seems to have a lot more visual pollution than most other MMO’s. It seems unfixable.

It starts with the multiple pet class design, it continues with many abilities looking similar and/or having no tells, add in fancy spell effects and multiple stealthing and it is a real mess.

If you PvP a lot you probably predict and anticipate abilities more than react.

hell I have maybe 2k matches played and I STILL have a very hard time figure out who killed who while watching pvp match. Too much effects makes gw2 boring to watch.

A major complication with effectively broadcasting / spectating GW2 is that all of the players are important, the action is non-stop, and combat can be quick and decisive.

You’ll note that these are things that are typically billed as positives by players, but it makes it so the only way to show what the hell just happened is to do a lot of slowed down replays with commentary between matches.

Teutos.8620:

-snip-

To each their own. LoL is super super boring to me. I find nothing interesting in it at all. Absolutely nothing.

Its alrdy boring to watch a game being played by other people ….

I feel like this when I watch Starcraft 2 or LOL tournaments. I get bored after 5 minutes and go back to do something else. I also have no idea what is happening anywhere there or why it is happening.

When I watch Guildwars 2 tourney though I always get the gist of what’s happening simply by watching it, and the details get explained by the Commentators.

its boring to watch other people play.

PistolWhip.2697:

This is exactly how I feel when I watch Counter Strike or Smite. Or a lot of games. (Albeit without particle effects.) I dunno wtf is going on so I get bored and switch to GW2 on twitch.

It is just generally true that without having knowledge of most things it will seem like random jibberish without context.

This is true for words.
This is true for pictures.
This is true for games. etc.

this tone is repeated a few times in this thread and its a flat out lie. People like certain music genres over other types. Some people like country some like techno and they each know why they do. Gamers know what type of genre video games they like to play and most tend to stay with that type only. Companies know this “razer” and make mmo keyboards and fps keyboards. So dont act naive to genres, its fine if you dont like some of them.

Also ive been to every blizzcon but 1 “blizzards convention in anaheim” they have 3-4 stages with all the games they offer being played by pro teams with sponsors. You know what has the smallest stage/crowd? Its always been the MMO/Arena PvP!

enjoy placing limits on your self!!!

I enjoy watching e-sports, I enjoy playing GW2 but I can’t force myself to watch GW2 pvp because of what the OP said – its incredibly confusing to see what is going on.

Even the commentators lose the action when casting. If they can’t follow it what chance does your random viewer have?

lordhelmos.7623:

This topic has been brought up before.

I was watching some old streams of the PvP World Tournaments. As an experiment I brought my fiance in (who is an avid gamer who plays Smite and Couterstrike religiously) to spectate the game.

She has never watched a Gw2 game before and her synopsis was complete confusion. She complained about the particle effects obscuring all of the animations. Majority of people were using Asura characters so her comment was it looked like a “Chibi Smurf War.”

At one point, a Shoutbow warrior landed a final thrust and dropped a guy. She was like WTF just happened? The animation for the burst was so obscure she couldn’t figure out what was going on and why the guy died.

After about 10 minutes she got bored and wandered off to do something else. I wonder, how many other people watch tournaments and feel this way? How many are met with confusion and view the game as unappealing from a spectator standpoint because they can’t figure out what’s going on?

She complained to me that all she saw was “A kaleidoscope of disco lights spewing from every player and a ton of boring numbers popping up.” She couldn’t telegraph big hits or even figure out what people were doing. She seemed surprised when people died and kept asking me “How did that guy go down?”

Just something to take into account of how the game might look to a first timer from a spectator perspective. She never really got excited. It made me realize that the way the game is presented to outsiders and it’s not good.

My brother was the SAME way, because WoW’s moves and particle effects are so clear and easy to understand what’s going on. Then he played PvP for a little and is hooked. It’s really just a matter of learning a game’s graphic styles

I’ve taken my fiance to baseball games and have heard roughly the same response. She’s not from America, so she wasn’t raised around the sport. Why are all these dudes in knee-high socks dancing around in those boxes trying to hit the ball? Why is there some guy standing off to the side rubbing his ears and clapping his hands randomly? And why does the runner have to stop running, and when can they keep going?

It’s the case for any game or sport: they’re all learned. Some of them are more transparent than others, but until you pick up a bat and glove, or until you have someone laboriously explain every detail to you, you’re just not going to get it.

yeah, gw2 pvp streams are pretty much a rainbow of graphical effects being thrown around by pint-sized asura with basically zero choreographs for anything. if a thief spikes someone down with c&d + bs it’s kinda just like “wat just happened” whereas if you see darius ult someone in LoL you’ve got the bleed stacks displayed around the target champion, he takes a leap, yells and you hear a brutal sound effect making it pretty obvious the ability was an execute.

gw2 pvp needs classes with fewer, yet clearer abilities so that people can actually keep track of what’s going on, and character models large enough that you can actually see the abilities being used. and then maybe a not terrible, not borefest game mode like conquest.

I can’t even tell what’s going on while I’m playing so I doubt there’s any hope of someone just watching being able to tell what’s going on. Its just too fast.

The main problem of GW2 is the pace.

When a character can spam so many skills within one second, it’s too hard to tell what does each one do.

While changes to address that could make the game easier to understand and more comfortable to play for some people, for those used to instant spam it may slow and clunky until they get used to timing sequences.

GW2 dev1: “Let’s create an MMO with super fast gameplay like an FPS.”
GW2 dev2: “Let’s create an MMO with MOBA-style maps and lanes.”
GW2 dev3: “Ok we’ll make it super fast like an FPS but we’ve already decided conquest is the only map. We’ll add lanes later.”
GW2 dev4: “Why don’t we just create a next-gen MMO? I’m sure we can create a good one, we made a top MMO before and the genre has been around for 15 years. We should be fine with just MMO, we don’t need the -FPS-MOBA stuff tacked on.”
GW2 dev123: “you’re fired, #4.”

Have you ever tried watching one of those random promoted twitch tournaments? Most games are complete nonsense unless you’re familiar with it. FPSs are probably the only ones anyone can understand.

I’ve never played LoL and I tried watching a game, I was like WTFFFF is going on and turned it off after like 3 minutes. Also there is some apparently extremely popular tank game (I guess it’s European?) that I tried to watch. Everyone just instantly died. It was ridiculous, but it had over 17,000 viewers.

Fluffball.8307:

Have you ever tried watching one of those random promoted twitch tournaments? Most games are complete nonsense unless you’re familiar with it. FPSs are probably the only ones anyone can understand.

Most games aren’t that great, otherwise top level tournaments would be more than a handful of games. GW2 PVP isn’t discernible even if you are familiar with it. This is one of the best selling MMOs out there, it was the best seller of 2012 and sold 1 million copies before release. Where is the pvp community?

I’ve never played LoL and I tried watching a game, I was like WTFFFF is going on and turned it off after like 3 minutes. Also there is some apparently extremely popular tank game (I guess it’s European?) that I tried to watch. Everyone just instantly died. It was ridiculous, but it had over 17,000 viewers.

Don’t you see? GW2 has no viewers. 50k USD tourney and still no viewers. GvG does better, has no support and is truly a mess to watch. So what’s holding back sPvP?

data.4093:

Most games aren’t that great, otherwise top level tournaments would be more than a handful of games. GW2 PVP isn’t discernible even if you are familiar with it.

Again, this is true for most games. And GW2 isn’t that bad you just need to have experience in watching and looking at the right queues. The shoutcasters for GW2 tourneys are doing a pretty good job at explaining the moment-to-moment gameplay, because that’s what they train to do – the rest of us trains to actually play the game.

The same is true for example for StarCraft 2 – I play the game and know the general stuff but I’m always wondering where the shoutcasters get all their information from tiny queues in the game engine.

data.4093:

Don’t you see? GW2 has no viewers. 50k USD tourney and still no viewers. GvG does better, has no support and is truly a mess to watch. So what’s holding back sPvP?

The single biggest thing that holds GW2’s pvp back from getting more viewers is that there’s no free 2 play client available like for all the other esports games. With a free2play client you automatically get more people interested, more people streaming and more people viewing. From there on you can build something.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

The single biggest thing that holds GW2’s pvp back from getting more viewers is that there’s no free 2 play client available like for all the other esports games. With a free2play client you automatically get more people interested, more people streaming and more people viewing. From there on you can build something.

C’mon man…at least 3 million copies in NA/EU. 4(?) million in china. I’m just saying….

data.4093:

C’mon man…at least 3 million copies in NA/EU. 4(?) million in china. I’m just saying….

1) That’s not that much (compare LOL with it’s almost 30 million players). Also the chinese game is completely separate from our game and I don’t think the chinese even have access to twitch.
2) Most of those players focus only on pvp with maybe some wvw.
3) Most players actually interested in competitive esports don’t buy games because why should they when there as a LOT of free 2 play games that offer extremely competitive gameplay?

I still think that both participation in game and on streams would rise extremely well with some kind of free 2 play client. Maybe only make 2 rotating classes available per week for free, with the rest having to be unlocked, something like that – it would also mean they could monetize pvp (for non-buyers of the full game) and therefore get some more internal resources for pvp even.

Dahkeus.8243:

Well…it’s not surprising at all that a game she doesn’t play is confusing to her.

This would really be the same case for any MMO out there.

May be true, I have a friend who I tried to get into GW2 but he has the same problem as OP…. He’s the biggest gamer I know too, even creates his own games and separate programs to overlay games he already owns.

If I remember correctly he said “The coding is faulty, the animations make zero kittening sense and the game looks like it was designed for primary school”…

I’ve tried showing him there is more to the game but unfortunately when I showed him PvP he made comments confirming the age group of the game by looking at play styles and various other “stand still and spam builds”… The only thing he thought GW2 had going for it was the thief mobility and playstyle

sephiroth.4217:

Dahkeus.8243:

Well…it’s not surprising at all that a game she doesn’t play is confusing to her.

This would really be the same case for any MMO out there.

May be true, I have a friend who I tried to get into GW2 but he has the same problem as OP…. He’s the biggest gamer I know too, even creates his own games and separate programs to overlay games he already owns.

If I remember correctly he said “The coding is faulty, the animations make zero kittening sense and the game looks like it was designed for primary school”…

I’ve tried showing him there is more to the game but unfortunately when I showed him PvP he made comments confirming the age group of the game by looking at play styles and various other “stand still and spam builds”… The only thing he thought GW2 had going for it was the thief mobility and playstyle

I almost exclusively only know nerds, and I’ve never once heard any of them try to say “the coding is faulty” with a game. I’d be curious to see what sort of grown-up games he plays.

I would definitely argue there are too many flashy AoEs, too much boon spam, too much condition spam, and the graphical effects don’t seem to match up with the affect abilities have on the game (huge damage in tiny animations, etc.). They give you the ability to dodge, but pack a lot of damage into instants for some classes, and as mentioned, those instants are often not super flashy, so a viewer has no idea what happened.

However, I think part of the problem is that from a spectator perspective, the game focuses you on said combat, and not on a larger strategy. Most often, a spectator sport will reel you in by allowing you to first understand a simple concept players are trying to achieve, such as:

• Get the ball into the other team’s goal, and keep the ball from going into yours (generalize “ball” and “goal”, and you have football, basketball, hockey, and soccer already)
• Destroy the enemy team’s throne before they destroy yours (most of the popular MOBAs)
• Wipe the enemy team/player off the map (round-based games, RTSes for the most part, though the RTS genre is sadly dying)

Conquest doesn’t really lend itself to a super easy explanation that you can watch from a distance. “Get to 500 points first” is abstract. You have to understand how points are achieved in every instance (deaths, nodes, etc.) in order to understand what might be impactful. Someone dying in a teamfight might not be as meaningful as a clever node-decap in a 1v1 off on the side of the map. So if you don’t really understand how a team wins conceptually, all you can do is focus on the fights.

And yes, the fights are a visual nightmare to try to follow. There are so many effects flying around, but it’s difficult to tell what means what. As a new spectator, you now have trouble following what is happening in a fight, it can be difficult to see how one team is gaining ground besides a simple “they have two nodes to the other team’s one”. But depending on where points are at, that might be OK, or it might be just enough to swing the victory. How can you tell? Without experience, you can’t.

All things considered, I think the game mode kills PvP the most. Many other popular spectator e-sports also have down-time. There’s a period where you are anticipating the next play, whether it is a laning phase, waiting for Rosh to spawn (DOTA 2), setting up for the next down in football. Some sports do pull off constant action, but usually anticipation slowly builds as a team maneuvers around a goal. There is still time to relax when the ball/puck is being recovered by the defending side as they push it into offense. But with Conquest, it’s just people slamming into each other for the duration, mostly.

If you had something to hold onto so you could watch fights from a distance and think more about the outcome than the little details, you could probably get past the visuals that bombard you at the start, because then it isn’t about the fighting. And if it IS going to be about the fighting, then the fighting needs to be something you can sit, watch, and generally understand (big, flashy animations are big damage; boons are special cases where you are more powerful; conditions are special cases where you are weaker). Right now, you can pretty easily see someone with 5 unique boons and 4-5 unique conditions, and at a glance, it’s difficult to tell how he’s doing. Maybe he’s fine and it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s getting wrecked. If I could change one thing about the game, it would honestly be a huge reduction in boons, conditions, and condition removal, but I digress.

I do love conversations like this though.

It looks like that to an outsider? I’m pretty sure it’s the same for a lot of veterans.

It’s a giant mess in larger fights, random aoe firing off, people randomly dieng to instant burst, so on so forth.