Guild Wars 2

Hello.

Like many I returned to the game with the season five reward changes. Overall, I had a great time playing last season. With the start of season six however, I find myself playing less not so much on the basis of the rewards as it is the fact that playing 400-plus games of Conquest in a two month period builds a certain level of fatigue that demands a longer break than what you’ve given us.

A few years ago you guys came out with the Courtyard map: a 5v5 Conquest map with no capture points. It was panned at the time and still harbors a number of negative opinions, but that was largely due to its existence in the Conquest map rotation and not the map itself.

Are there any plans, internally, to do anything with Courtyard—perhaps to make it its own 3v3 TDM mode? It would be such a simple addition to the game that I think would really pay off in the long run, and would give many of us fatigued of Conquest to have something else to do.

PvP is in desperate need of more game modes, and simple additions like TDM and CTF would help greatly to breathe new life into the game mode more than ascended armor would.

Courtyard was never given a chance in the first place: you couldn’t play it even if you wanted to (because it was in the Conquest queue), and if you rolled for it, you hadn’t the right build for it. That was so unfortunate.

There are been many times where I failed to understand decisions by ANet in terms of PvP direction. Building new things but not allowing players to play them (CY…), removing things that players enjoyed (8v8…), not providing things that players requested (build templates…).

It feels like PvP has to be a very serious thing for very serious players, and cannot exist otherwise. I’m now a disappointed player, waiting for the next expac in the hope they bring something new and cool (and do not remove it afterwards).

Courtyard got removed because anet didn’t want to deal with balancing a combat only game mode.

Elegie.3620:

There are been many times where I failed to understand decisions by ANet in terms of PvP direction. Building new things but not allowing players to play them (CY…), removing things that players enjoyed (8v8…), not providing things that players requested (build templates…).

If there’s one thing you can recognize that has changed since the start of Mike’s tenure as game director, it’s their emphasis on “trimming of the fat.”

Under Colin, it really felt like ArenaNet was constantly laying down new foundations rather than build up existing infrastructure. The Living Story Season One is a really great example of this. Not so much in the sense that stuff would be added and disappear but that the content itself would be so ridiculously different from release to release. This was largely because the LS1 was designed by a number of different teams, but I imagine a lot of this also had to do with the amount of independence granted to each of these teams. And while a lot of the releases were very good and were later repurposed into fractals (e.g., Flame and Frost, Nightmare tower) many of them weren’t, and felt like rushed, interim projects meant to fill the void between the larger releases like the Queen’s Gauntlet, Tequatl, Marionette, Super Adventure Box, and Wurm. There was just a lot of kitten being churned out with very little concern of a broader picture.

As much as I loved the LS1, and even though the LS1 makes up the majority of the best post-launch content in this game’s life span (far better than anything post-HoT, though the recent releases come close) it did often feel like they were just spitballing ideas and throwing them at the wall, waiting to see what would stick.

A lot of what “stuck” ended up coming into shape as the LS2, but a lot of what didn’t “stick” was left behind and forgotten, in what appears to a lot of people, including myself, to be a great deal of wasted resources. I have a feeling that Mike feels largely the same, and is trying to avoid that from happening again.

The problem is that Courtyard was one of the things that didn’t stick—not because it was a bad idea, but because they implemented it very poorly. As you stated yourself:

Elegie.3620:

Courtyard was never given a chance in the first place: you couldn’t play it even if you wanted to (because it was in the Conquest queue), and if you rolled for it, you hadn’t the right build for it. That was so unfortunate.

It is super unfortunate, and I really do believe if ArenaNet made the effort to give it another shot to the same degree they’d give a universally-hated map like Capricorn, they might find a huge success on their hands.

TDM is simple. It’s easy. It’s straight forward. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. Make it 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3. Give it its own mode designation similar to what Stronghold has, and just see what happens.

See if it sticks. They have relatively nothing to lose, as the map assets are already there. It would be a good idea of they deleted the lanes and just give us that main central area to skirmish in, though.

R O C.6574:

Courtyard got removed because anet didn’t want to deal with balancing a combat only game mode.

What difference is there to balance? It’s not like Conquest doesn’t revolve around killing people.

It’s literally the easiest mode in the world to balance around, and it might actually produce some build variety that Conquest discourages—for obvious reasons.