For any e-sport to sustain it needs spectators. Who are those spectators going to be? Your non-pro players who are just enjoying the game! You MUST take care of those players first and put the money into the features they need before your game can properly go e-sport and sustain that status. You must do this. For whatever reasons, ArenaNet decided it wasn’t important. Instead ArenaNet decided to hire a competitive brand manager and has pumped kitten knows how much into marketing GW2 as an ESL e-sport. This was money that could have been put into making sPvP a better experience for all of us.
They likely did all this based on some graphs presented to them which indicated the PvP side of the game was the fastest growing segment of GW2. They seemed to not consider it was the fastest growing segment because
1.) No new PvE content had been released and
2.) After three years the sPvP meta had finally stabilized.
So what did they do after announcing the ESL Pro League, League system (Guild Challenge League leaderboards) and $200k prize pool? They did the following
1.) They released an entire expansion of new content including new Legendaries items to grind for and Raids to offer real end-game to the PvE crowd GW2 has always catered to. Aside from one new MOBA style map (now removed from ranked play with no ETA on it’s return) they invested nothing new in sPvP mechanic or feature wise except for a late-to-the-party broken League system.
2.) They completely destroyed the old sPvP meta that had taken 3 years to stabilize, forcing the Pro teams to run some very, very boring builds and also completely mucking up ranked play for the non-pro players (can’t count how many times I’ve queued with old friends who are still running their Hammer Warrior or Burn Guard build thinking they are going to help the team).
They created a state of chaos in PvP. Play mechanics are what draw a person into a game and keep them interested. A Ranger rolled a ranger for a reason, now they are forced to be a Druid to be effective. A lot of Mesmers loved playing PU Shatter, now they must Chrono bunker. When you put design in place that steals mechanics players love and force them to play an entirely different way or not play to win at all, that is just horrible, horrible design.
On the PvE side of the game non Elite Specs still work alright for most content (exception being Raids and high level Fractals) people have choices but PvP is where balance must exist or the game becomes complete garbage.
There’s more…
Another simple truth is that, ArenaNet wanted GW2 to go e-sport but didn’t want to put the kind of money into improving the sPvP systems needed for the non-pro players. Where is solo queue? Where is the ability to spectate previous matches you’ve played or for that matter to even spectate past ESL matches and be able to appreciate past games from whatever players perspective you’d like. Are we going to see non-pro level Tournaments for the best teams in Ruby and Diamond? Why not have an entire season end week of Torunaments for the best guild teams in the top three divisions. If it cost too much to put lower division tournments on Twitch then don’t live stream them. Again I can’t say how disgusted I am that there is no in-game client spectate option for previous games. There are so many, many things they can do to nurture the existing PvP community and they just aren’t putting any money/effort into this aspect of the game outside of marketing the ESL side of it. We all should be very angry about that.
There is so much ArenaNet needs to do in order to take care of the non-pro players and in many ways these systems (such as spectate past match) would also help pro teams. Overall it’s just a horribly managed mess.
How to fix?
I honestly don’t know at this point, but if it were my decision I would suspend he current ranked season or suspend elite specializations from ranked play until a proper balance patch can happen.
The problem I suspect is that the Elite Specialization balance is exactly where they want it. They don’t want your pre HoT meta build to be viable anymore (not even if you change to new mods and update it) they want entirely new play mechanics to be the focus in hopes everyone will rush out an buy HoT. It all comes back to greed over integrity.
(edited by SamTheGuardian.2938)