Guild Wars 2

It is beyond me to understand why a balance patch takes months to put together, especially when the developers know they overbuffed a profession.

The lack of a prompt fix makes me believe ANet simply is not serious about making their PvP good.

assumptions,presumptions,ignorance

not refering to anet

To answer your question more seriously, it’s to let the meta catch up. Then, I’d imagine to do some testing with changes and make sure everything new they’re about to change is on par with everything else so they don’t accidentally make it worse.

Just from what I’ve read.

Except even when they wait for the meta to settle they still end up overbuffing things to a ridiculous degree or throwing in a poorly thought out change like immob stacking and somehow making the gameplay even more shallow and unbalanced. I’d say the months between updates was just neglect since spvp isn’t as much of a cash shop cow for them, but the sheer awfulness of the continually worsening meta just makes me think it’s flat out incompetence on the devs part.

PvP doesn’t make them money so it has less resources which leads to less income and thereby less resources. Repeat this for a little over a year and you get to where GW2 is now.

It’s just not as profitable as recoloring some weapon skins and putting 1/10th of them in an RNG box at a 10% chance.

Divinity.8041:

caed quit today

it must be fun playing a glass cannon burst that can’t burst anyone down , but gets bursted by everyone else

FoopOplo.7914:

To answer your question more seriously, it’s to let the meta catch up. Then, I’d imagine to do some testing with changes and make sure everything new they’re about to change is on par with everything else so they don’t accidentally make it worse.

Just from what I’ve read.

If you are a developer and you know you overbuffed a profession, why would you knowingly wait for the ‘meta’ to catch up first? It seems illogical. There may very well be counter-compositions out there that ‘would be’ viable against these warrior comps but are not due the profession being imbalanced.

If you wait for the meta to catch up, are you really letting the meta evolve to where it should be, or are you allowing a skewed meta evolve from the current profession imbalance?

Thedenofsin.7340:

FoopOplo.7914:

To answer your question more seriously, it’s to let the meta catch up. Then, I’d imagine to do some testing with changes and make sure everything new they’re about to change is on par with everything else so they don’t accidentally make it worse.

Just from what I’ve read.

If you are a developer and you know you overbuffed a profession, why would you knowingly wait for the ‘meta’ to catch up first? It seems illogical. There may very well be counter-compositions out there that ‘would be’ viable against these warrior comps but are not due the profession being imbalanced.

If you wait for the meta to catch up, are you really letting the meta evolve to where it should be, or are you allowing a skewed meta evolve from the current profession imbalance?

but they changed the trait and skill facts.. isnt that not open a complete new world with a lot of possibilities?

hooma.9642:

Thedenofsin.7340:

FoopOplo.7914:

To answer your question more seriously, it’s to let the meta catch up. Then, I’d imagine to do some testing with changes and make sure everything new they’re about to change is on par with everything else so they don’t accidentally make it worse.

Just from what I’ve read.

If you are a developer and you know you overbuffed a profession, why would you knowingly wait for the ‘meta’ to catch up first? It seems illogical. There may very well be counter-compositions out there that ‘would be’ viable against these warrior comps but are not due the profession being imbalanced.

If you wait for the meta to catch up, are you really letting the meta evolve to where it should be, or are you allowing a skewed meta evolve from the current profession imbalance?

but they changed the trait and skill facts.. isnt that not open a complete new world with a lot of possibilities?

How did you pack so much sarcasm into those electrons?

Thedenofsin.7340:

hooma.9642:

Thedenofsin.7340:

FoopOplo.7914:

To answer your question more seriously, it’s to let the meta catch up. Then, I’d imagine to do some testing with changes and make sure everything new they’re about to change is on par with everything else so they don’t accidentally make it worse.

Just from what I’ve read.

If you are a developer and you know you overbuffed a profession, why would you knowingly wait for the ‘meta’ to catch up first? It seems illogical. There may very well be counter-compositions out there that ‘would be’ viable against these warrior comps but are not due the profession being imbalanced.

If you wait for the meta to catch up, are you really letting the meta evolve to where it should be, or are you allowing a skewed meta evolve from the current profession imbalance?

but they changed the trait and skill facts.. isnt that not open a complete new world with a lot of possibilities?

How did you pack so much sarcasm into those electrons?

its magic

I would say that it takes so long because something that happens in EVERY large organization: RED TAPE.

I am sure the balance team wants to move faster than they are (but not as fast as most players would like) so that problems don’t persist for months. However, changes need to be looked at by EVERY department (translators, PvE teams, WvW teams, etc.) as well as bug-tested (even though some will slip through) before getting the go-ahead. The even mentioned before that they have to kind of guess at which changes to make 2-3 months ahead of when they will actually be made.

An analogy is this: I worked for an engineering company and would occasionally make changes to production drawings. Every time something was changed, it had to be approved by about 8 different people, at a cost of about $1000 per drawing and weeks of time. Similar issues abound here, especially because this is a PvE game primarily, and the PvE team has even more sway in vetoing changes.

Not splitting skills may make some aspects of coding easier, but makes balancing exponentially harder (even though they could just adjust #’s).

Any process that makes you less effective at what you do needs to be replaced.

There are other MMO’s out there that can push out bug fixes with far greater efficiency than GW2.

For the same reason every balance patch is ill thought out.

The people running this aren’t capable of making good PvP short of by chance.

I don’t believe that. I believe the developers know what they are doing. Perhaps they don’t enough data samples to fully realize the magnitude of the changes they make.

It just seems like it makes sense to make more frequent, smaller changes than infrequent, large changes.

Thedenofsin.7340:

I don’t believe that. I believe the developers know what they are doing. Perhaps they don’t enough data samples to fully realize the magnitude of the changes they make.

It just seems like it makes sense to make more frequent, smaller changes than infrequent, large changes.

If you’ve been watching patches since open beta (I have), you’ll see that the devs haven’t really had a grasp on ‘what needs fixing’ and never on ‘how it should be fixed’.

There hasn’t been a single patch that really improved gameplay (the closest was the quickness nerf, but they only shifted the meta to mindless condi-kitten and left the entire warrior class in shambles for months, when if finally became viable again it was just as cheesy if not more so than before…)
The point was to improve gameplay… they managed to turn a good change into hurting it in next to every way possible.

Well, they said it’s because they didn’t want whack a mole balancing, but IMO this game has just as much whack a mole balancing except the rate of balancing is far slower.