Guild Wars 2

I have actually stopped pvping in this game recently after having done it since the game came out. Here is why in an as objective of a description as possible:

1- The reward systems was quite ill conceived. Specially at higher ranks there is a huge gap between when you get something new, in between you accumulate so much glory that when you hit the next tier you get everything in that tier at once. There should be more special skins tied to certain accomplishments, each skin should be harder to get and bought individually, skins should be spread out so you got one every 2 ranks or so. There needs to be more things you can buy with glory rather just skins: fun items, new /animations, there a lot of possibilities.
2- I love the idea of animations being key rather than castbars. However, too many abilities and certain classes in particular don’t have proper tells on their animation, there also too many fast casts/instant casts. All of which is aggravated by tiny asura’s. This has made the game very spammy offensively because there are a lot of weapon/kit sets where the best way to play is to just spam every ability the second it’s up since it’s unlikely people will have time for counter play or be able to read what you’re doing. On the other side the best counter is to spam dodge (and there are waay too many dodges). So many fights come down to luck of which spamming happened by chance at the right time, there is not enough reactive, strategic combat.
3- There are too many hard counters. Soft counters are great, but hard counters is the difference between strategic depth and rock, paper, scissors. Some professions and builds for example get hard countered by a fear/condi spam, even at equal skill level they’ll die to that every time. Same for very long stuns that can be chained. Same for the abundance of abilities that complete nullify projectiles making classes that rely on them useless during key moments. And so on. Duration on hard CC’s needs to be lowered across the board, abilities that cancel other types of abilities should reduce their effectiveness instead (such as lower damage by 50%). Hard counter abilities should have very short durations and have to be timed well as a pinch move, not be used constantly.
4- Conditions are too spammable, but also too easy to remove for certain classes while being a death sentence for others. Condi removal should be available to more classes and builds, but in small amounts. It should take longer to put condis on someone but their removal should be harder and more strategic. Atm you get so many conditions on you so quickly the counter play is to spam condi removals as fast as possible, most of the time you can’t afford to “play” which ones to stick out and which ones not too. It’s spam on both sides.
5- Bunkering points is boring and not as fun as roaming, if your point isn’t being pushed you are literally just standing there, no one enjoys that, and it’s a problem. The mesmer portal offered a great solution where when someone secures a point they can put down a skill that take them back there so they can move out safely for a while on a CD. A lot more classes should have access to skills like that, it could even be a new skill everyone gets where you “commune” with a point you hold for 2 sec and it becomes your home point, then you can use a channeled 1 sec ability that takes you back there on a CD. Yes this would change a lot of strategies but so what, it would make the game more fun for everyone.

6- Hot join is awful, it’s a mess, it’s terrible for practice because it does not resemble an actual match, it teaches new players a lot of bad habits, but it’s your only option if you don’t want to play ranked games. Get rid of it and add solo and team unranked queue options (just keep custom arenas obviously).
7- The penalty for leaving matches once the roster is set (giving a resonable time window to log back in of course) needs to be very harsh. It’s been done in other games, people get used to it and just start taking it seriously. As it is it’s a joke and ruins countless matches.
8- You should get a set amount of glory based on whether you win or lose, that’s it. No glory for doing things in tournament, it leads to all kinds of awful glory farming behavior even in ranked matches… it’s just a bad and unnecessary system.
9- Conquest gets pretty boring after a while, the game needs more game modes rather desperately. 1v1, 3v3 and 5v5 death matches would be a great start. Also, people should be able to duel each other in the mists, having to find an empty conquest map to duel someone is terrible.
10- You need better balance, you’ve heard that before but here is how you do it. You need a proper public test server open to a very large number of players where people play with builds way ahead of release and give you tons of feedback. You’re using the live game as your real test for build changes and that’s your primary problem. So many things have gone through that wouldn’t have if players had a chance to test it properly for a good amount of time. If a class is flat out not viable, that’s a BIG problem and should be a priority for testing. Basically rolling out changes to the PTS every few days and have people try out a lot of stuff until something looks good. The amount of time it has taken you to make classes viable has been just awful, I waited over 6 months for warrior to be viable only for you to go overboard with their stun locking which I know will result in a nerf. And the fact eles and mesmers have gone now nearly two months as not viable? I know players who played mainly those classes and most of them quit the game. That’s bad. Also sigils and runes are completely unbalanced with a handful of very good ones and a lot of bads (and awfully buggy) ones.
11- There is not enough information on the interface. Internal CD trackers would make the game more fun and increase the skill cap by allowing players to utilize those timers to their advantage. Trying to keep track of hidden CDs as is an annoying guessing game, which goes well with guessing what your enemy is casting, but that’s not a good thing.

I agree with a lot of your points, and hopefully this thread will grow and become more noticed by the devs. Another few points you didn’t address.

• Bugs! There are still SO many bugs that exist with all 8 classes a year into the game, and some of these bugs are part of the class balance issues. If you go and look on the wiki you can see most of them, I really don’t know why more of these aren’t being addressed over more minor things like tooltip mistakes.
• Passive builds are currently too strong. Builds relying on AI are currently too rewarding for the level of skill required, and just shouldn’t be good enough to be viable in top level play. AI-based builds aren’t very fun to watch, make targeting frustrating, and just add to the cluttered mayhem of team fights for spectators.

i’d like to underline key issues:

asuras

rewards

asura

rewards

asura

hotjoin mess

asura

rewards

AoE mess

Conditions AoE mess

Asura

Rewards

Balance

No public testing

Asura

Rewards.

As you can see, basically what OP said, but he said it better.

Edit: more serious

Having teams to gain glory if they lose is ridicolous.

We should gain glory ONLY when we actually win, so a good overhaul of the reward system can be done, with glory as an effective CURRENCY instead of the useless crap we currently have kittenloads of.

aNet, we’re expecting something HUGE after pax crap, our patience is really ending and it would be useless to have a huge tournament like Pax one if no one cares about your game anymore ( tons of players are leaving, teams are disbanding, i’ve never seen such an exodus if not at svanir’s rune bug left unfixed for months).

Please.

Conquest and Rewards
We all know the game was built around the conquest game type. I mean, anyone seriously thinking of team death match should consider the lack of Healing classes in this game and the meta of, spike the targeted foe to win.

Back onto conquest though. As it stands, you can currently get more reward for following the zerg and killing other players then for actually doing the conquest objective. There have been matches where I have the “top every stat” (e.g. top neutralizer, assaulter, defender etc) bar killing and still not even make it close to the top of the score board. This raises the question of: “Why do I want to play conquest if I don’t get rewarded for it?” and “What is stopping me from going to the forums and requesting Team Death Match, after all it is what happens in conquest anyway?”

The reward needs to match the system in play. If you can “TDM” in a conquest game type and come out on top, over someone playing “Conquest” why would you want to play conquest?

PvP Rank
To add to this issue is the long amount of time it takes to lvl through the pvp ranks. The general gamers types (categories of players if you will) that are generally catered for within a game system are: Socialisers, Killers, Explorers and Achievers. Achievers want to achieve and will usually take any path to complete that goal. If that means ruin everyone’s day in Conquest playing as a Killer (as this seems to grant higher reward then playing conquest) then that is the path they will take.

Suggestions
As with negative feedback should come the proposal of solutions.

-Grant greater rewards to attacking / defending points.

-Place an event to for the opposing team to earn extra points by capturing an enemy point that has been in their control for a long period of time (hotjoin)

-Spread kill points over killers. So if 8 people gang up on 1 enemy those players will receive 1/8 of the points each. This could help to reduce Zerging

-Implement a system that players want to strive to win. At the moment the hot join games are casual and players want to beat each other up rather then strive to a goal. This relates back to “fun”, some players will have fun curb stomping others while some will want to play the game type intended. This one is would be hard. GW1 where you could ascend through your games and unlock a dungeon was cool, but combining PvE and PvP here would be not so fun.

E.G. Winning teams can be thrown into a match with unique maps where extra rewards await them (gear chests, other suggestions from people for currency etc, unique skins to say you are the best, hotjoin hero and seasonal champions from team/soloq)

Continued:
-Build up the Player base. Offer a PvP only version of Guildwars 2 for 10-20$ Comes with x character slots and can be upgraded to full.

-Perk type levelling systems. Levelling systems can be fun, however, it is much more exciting to unlock a whole new play style through ranking up (such as CoD and War thunder where levelling up offers new weapons or planes respectively). Here levelling only offers Visual effects. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take your Dragon Rank and summon a Dragon to fight with you (PvE), or command nearby Wolves / Doylaks / Bears to fight with you (using your /rank)? While again this ties to PvE, its hard to come up with fun ideas for a strick pvp environment. (Cannon and Treb fire dragon fire balls instead of their respective ammunitions, visual effect only)

-Although probably a bad idea, tie together PvP, WvW and PvE to make them a 1 requires the other system. Remember Favour of the Gods? What about a new, Warriors of the Mists, the god of Balthazar is happy with the battles taking place in the mists and has “opened” the doors to his palace, defeat his warriors to stand side by side with the god himself. etc. etc.

Further E.G.
Boons to profession based on profession numbers in the mists (only applicable to WvW and PvE).

My Pretties: The Doylak has earned you the right to parade your armour with pride. You may were Doylak ranked gear in PvE and receive all its effects, open the achievement panel to access this gear. This is PvP level locked, so PvEers wanting the gear should still prefer to do the PvE way of getting it, but pvpers wanting to adventure into PvE can do so with shiny new gear.

Glorified Advancement: At each rank you receive an experience Tomb, this will level your PvE character level a certain amount depending on PvP rank. Can only be used once. Additional Level Tombs can be purchased from the appropriate vendors and costs a lot of glory.

-And for the love of all the is High and Mighty a Stone Statue of the top PvP players of Solo Q (top 3 or something) and the number 1 team. This statue will be somewhere everyone goes and will see it … Lions Arch. Each capital would be cool to see the top player of that race immortalised in a statue.

-Another idea I had before were global announcers spectate-able matches of top rated teams duking it out for a place in the top of the leader board.

That’s all the ideas I have right now

There have been dozens better written, more in depth constructive posts floated around these forums. Not a criticism on your posts so much as a show of how many people have taken fixing GW2 to heart.
Anyways, Anet has ignored them all.

So far the devs have shown that they don’t know what a better game is, or just don’t have the resources to fix this one… whats relevant from that is that the forums seemingly have been marked by the devs as a place to ‘appease the masses’. Nothing said here has been taken seriously unless it was addressing something the devs are already considering and are in the process of doing….

Anyways, I could be wrong, hope is great to have, I don’t wanna jump up and down on it if it’s your thing.

I want a tiger finisher. After that I am not interested in this gamemode anymore.

You should know by now that Arenanet only cares about ‘constructive feedback’ if that feedback is about what they want or are working on.

Feedback, not suggestions.

God.. I wish Anet would read this.
There are so many nice suggestions. I hadn’t even thought of how the bunker(fun) problem could be solved. Your idea is fine, but simply giving each class a new utility skill would help the situation even more (Imo), since it would create more build diversity. It should be a channeled teleport maybe with a secondary effect that relates to the class. Very similar to the ressurrection abilities we already have. Guardian could heal at their teleported location, Elementalists could maybe teleport an ally with them while being in Air Attunement, Mesmers would create two clones etc.
The already existing portal for Mesmer could also be their “new” skill, and then just give them a new utility to replace it as “Manipulation”(If I remember correctly)
Giving every class a teleport might even be a bad idea (would need testing), but giving classes with bad mobility a high cooldown teleport would definitely change the meta.

Thumbs up! If this is not contructive feedback, I think we are doomed.

In my opinion, portal should remove a certain amount of conditions. And no, I dont play mesmer.

cymerdown.4103:

I agree with a lot of your points, and hopefully this thread will grow and become more noticed by the devs. Another few points you didn’t address.

• Bugs! There are still SO many bugs that exist with all 8 classes a year into the game, and some of these bugs are part of the class balance issues. If you go and look on the wiki you can see most of them, I really don’t know why more of these aren’t being addressed over more minor things like tooltip mistakes.
• Passive builds are currently too strong. Builds relying on AI are currently too rewarding for the level of skill required, and just shouldn’t be good enough to be viable in top level play. AI-based builds aren’t very fun to watch, make targeting frustrating, and just add to the cluttered mayhem of team fights for spectators.

Agreed on both counts. I also agree that spirits and minions builds should be pve builds, they’re bad for pvp. You already have a ranger pet, up to 5 players and possibly mesmer clones in a single small node. When you add a minion necro or one (or two ) spirit rangers the amount of things in a small area gets ridiculous. Targeting becomes way too difficult so everyone just starts spamming AOE on cd. That’s not engaging game play.

KrisHQ.4719:

God.. I wish Anet would read this.
There are so many nice suggestions. I hadn’t even thought of how the bunker(fun) problem could be solved. Your idea is fine, but simply giving each class a new utility skill would help the situation even more (Imo), since it would create more build diversity. It should be a channeled teleport maybe with a secondary effect that relates to the class. Very similar to the ressurrection abilities we already have. Guardian could heal at their teleported location, Elementalists could maybe teleport an ally with them while being in Air Attunement, Mesmers would create two clones etc.
The already existing portal for Mesmer could also be their “new” skill, and then just give them a new utility to replace it as “Manipulation”(If I remember correctly)
Giving every class a teleport might even be a bad idea (would need testing), but giving classes with bad mobility a high cooldown teleport would definitely change the meta.

Thumbs up! If this is not contructive feedback, I think we are doomed.

Yes every class having their own flavor of it would be great, I think it should be a new skill slot though, chosen abilities are cramped as they are. But this new slot could only be occupied by that type of skill, sort of like the heal slot. They should all have some sort of cast time because trying to interrupt someone trying to get back to their node (or having to worry about it) is smart gameplay, as in if you’re on top of their back noder you tell your thief to go back cap them and get ready to interrupt him when he starts to channel back, though he may dodge/cancel out the interrupt somehow and still make it, counter play all around. The default CD should be that the “binding” (should be a 2 sec cast) lasts for 3 minutes and once the “return” is cast (or 3 minutes expires) it goes on a 3 minutes CD. While it could be used to disengage from a fight it could be interrupt and the CD means you couldn’t do it very often not to mention if let’s say you want to push mid and have home, if you went home to channel your bind then go mid that would slow down your rotation greatly, so most of the time roamers wouldn’t even have a binding unless the chance arises. Once the binding is created a very obvious timer overlay should appear over the icon. This would be a self only teleport so mesmer portal can remain as a skill for group movement and in fact be saved for group pushes since the mesmer would have another way to get back on point.

@Julius
Having a very powerful, strategical and supportive utility skill was exactly what I was trying to accomplish by making it yet another utility.
Too many people are running Shouts, Stances, Cantrips etc.
And while I understand that, because those utilities are very good, most of them are instant cast and grant either boons, remove conditions and/or make you invulnerable.
Not what I would call interesting gameplay.
They are most like “Oh kitten” buttons you can hit when in trouble.
If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

@krishHQ
I think it should be a base game mechanic everyone has, like a heal. As is there are only 3 slots for skills you get to pick from a broad array (since the heal and elite slots have only 3 choices each) and it feels pretty crowded to me. While GW1 had less overall slots, the weapon slots weren’t set, if something like this were to be added it should just have it’s own slot, possibly with 3 options of “side effects” for each class. ie for guardian for example: reduce recall cast time by 25%, grand 5 sec of protection on completing recall cast, heal guardian for 5k on home binding cast completion.

Julius.1094:

8- You should get a set amount of glory based on whether you win or lose, that’s it. No glory for doing things in tournament, it leads to all kinds of awful glory farming behavior even in ranked matches… it’s just a bad and unnecessary system.
.

So you want to reward AFKers for doing nothing? Are you sure you thought this one through?

In a competitive environment, things such as target-breaks/stealth/teleports/forced movement will always cause issues, in small amounts they are ok, but they are far too in abundance in GW2.

-In-combat Stealth needs tweaking (stealth has so many uses it is just too good of a tool) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-In-Combat-stealth/first
-Breaking target is a bit of a problem when facing thieves, mesmers and engineers (sometimes). This causes more frustration that anything, when in a team fight there is no way to actually focus a target when they can simply lose all focus in the press of a button.
- Abilities that forcibly move a player (push/pull/knockback/launch/sink/float/etc.) is the bane of any good competitive game when they are used in abundance. If it can be used strategically it can be a great tool, but in GW2 you can be pretty much thrown across a room 10 times over by the amount of skills that cause knockback, launch, etc. and this is just terrible design. Strategically pulling an enemy into your group, or knocking one off a ledge can be rewarding and helpful, but the cooldowns on these skills and the amount of them available across the board is just too much.

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

Lachanche.6859:

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

Because it’s garbage. It just randomly teleports you to the nearest ally. It would be like Judge’s Intervention teleporting to the nearest enemy instead of choosing your target. Also it’s regardless of health too. Yeah lets heal an ally that has full hp!

But Anet doesn’t want a “healer” class so they made it like that.

Harbinger.8637:

Lachanche.6859:

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

Because it’s garbage. It just randomly teleports you to the nearest ally. It would be like Judge’s Intervention teleporting to the nearest enemy instead of choosing your target. Also it’s regardless of health too. Yeah lets heal an ally that has full hp!

But Anet doesn’t want a “healer” class so they made it like that.

So why even add skills that heal allies for guardian? Its totally against their “no healer design”.

But then again, its no surprise, the entire game lacks consistency and polish.

1. Ridiculous damage

2. Traits that are useless

3. Useless trait system that only promotes passive play

4. Anti healer agenda but continues to push guardian to support and heal allies

5. Suppose to be observant to dodge, but with instant animations, 4th of july firework particles, tiny characters and stealth, makes it impossible

6. Promotes spamming every skill on cooldown, discourages intelligent gameplay

Believe me they aren’t going to fix any of this. Spvp, no pvp in general doesn’t bring income. So spvp is bottom tier priority. This can be seen in Anets approach to balancing pvp. Which has been so far very little compared to gw1.

Dirame.8521:

Julius.1094:

8- You should get a set amount of glory based on whether you win or lose, that’s it. No glory for doing things in tournament, it leads to all kinds of awful glory farming behavior even in ranked matches… it’s just a bad and unnecessary system.
.

So you want to reward AFKers for doing nothing? Are you sure you thought this one through?

It’s unlikely your team will win a 4v5 if you’re afk for the match, the amount of glory on a loss would be very small (like 20) while on a win large (300) so you would want your team to win and thus not go afk. And if you did go afk, that’s what report features are for, this game has an issue of proper penalities for afk and leavers that’s unrelated to glory. The difference between that proposed system is it encourages people to actually play to win the conquest match instead of doing dumb kitten like 3 capping a non contested point just to get glory or run around in a mob zerging and ignoring nodes.

Aza.2105:

Harbinger.8637:

Lachanche.6859:

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

Because it’s garbage. It just randomly teleports you to the nearest ally. It would be like Judge’s Intervention teleporting to the nearest enemy instead of choosing your target. Also it’s regardless of health too. Yeah lets heal an ally that has full hp!

But Anet doesn’t want a “healer” class so they made it like that.

So why even add skills that heal allies for guardian? Its totally against their “no healer design”.

But then again, its no surprise, the entire game lacks consistency and polish.

1. Ridiculous damage

2. Traits that are useless

3. Useless trait system that only promotes passive play

4. Anti healer agenda but continues to push guardian to support and heal allies

5. Suppose to be observant to dodge, but with instant animations, 4th of july firework particles, tiny characters and stealth, makes it impossible

6. Promotes spamming every skill on cooldown, discourages intelligent gameplay

Believe me they aren’t going to fix any of this. Spvp, no pvp in general doesn’t bring income. So spvp is bottom tier priority. This can be seen in Anets approach to balancing pvp. Which has been so far very little compared to gw1.

The whole notion of “SPVP doesn’t bring income” is such bullkitten. DOTA 2 and LoL are nothing but spvp and they make a loooot of money, the format may be different but the principle and why people would want to play it is the same. Most of the money LoL makes is from selling skins, GW2 could be doing the same thing, if they had a very large and active spvp player population and regularly released cool looking armor and weapon skins on their shop they’d make a lot of money. They don’t because A) they don’t release enough good skins, and most importantly, there aren’t enough people pvping or who care enough to invest in it. People want to buy skins and the like for a game they feel they can play long term.

Julius.1094:

Aza.2105:

Harbinger.8637:

Lachanche.6859:

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

Because it’s garbage. It just randomly teleports you to the nearest ally. It would be like Judge’s Intervention teleporting to the nearest enemy instead of choosing your target. Also it’s regardless of health too. Yeah lets heal an ally that has full hp!

But Anet doesn’t want a “healer” class so they made it like that.

So why even add skills that heal allies for guardian? Its totally against their “no healer design”.

But then again, its no surprise, the entire game lacks consistency and polish.

1. Ridiculous damage

2. Traits that are useless

3. Useless trait system that only promotes passive play

4. Anti healer agenda but continues to push guardian to support and heal allies

5. Suppose to be observant to dodge, but with instant animations, 4th of july firework particles, tiny characters and stealth, makes it impossible

6. Promotes spamming every skill on cooldown, discourages intelligent gameplay

Believe me they aren’t going to fix any of this. Spvp, no pvp in general doesn’t bring income. So spvp is bottom tier priority. This can be seen in Anets approach to balancing pvp. Which has been so far very little compared to gw1.

The whole notion of “SPVP doesn’t bring income” is such bullkitten. DOTA 2 and LoL are nothing but spvp and they make a loooot of money, the format may be different but the principle and why people would want to play it is the same. Most of the money LoL makes is from selling skins, GW2 could be doing the same thing, if they had a very large and active spvp player population and regularly released cool looking armor and weapon skins on their shop they’d make a lot of money. They don’t because A) they don’t release enough good skins, and most importantly, there aren’t enough people pvping or who care enough to invest in it. People want to buy skins and the like for a game they feel they can play long term.

They are totally different games, they don’t have a pve portion of the game. GW1 was a pvp game with a pve game that was suppose to teach the pvp mechanics to players. GW2 is a pve game with a pvp game side show. BIG DIFFERENCE.

Pvp will never EVER be very populated vs pve. Its sad but true. Anet is making a killing because players enjoy pve. Pvp? Its like locked in a closet aka the mists that no one cares about.

At this point, its a little to late for them to salvage what is left of the pvp population. One year with little to no movement is a very very long time.

Lachanche.6859:

KrisHQ.4719:

If guardians had access to a teleport with an AoE Heal, would they trade it for a shout?
If the answer is yes and no, the new utility would work flawlessly.

OH, the irony. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

Yet i haven’ t seen a single guardian using that in tpvp lol.

I dont get it. Merciful Intervention has a 1200 range.
I’m talking about a map-wide teleport, like you would see in Dota.
The mechanics in the game do not really support it though. After a little thought, the only way to really give classes a teleport would be to split the skill, just like Mesmer’s portal. First ability would mark the spot, second would teleport you back to the marked spot. Would still be very interesting though.

@Julius
I think we have to agree to disagree

Mixing up PvE with PvP definitely hurts what can be done on the PvP side of things. I think for a game to really succeed in the PvP department it needs to be made solely for PvP. Right now we are seeing so many roadblocks because of the PvE side of the game. The channels for communication become convoluted, slowing down processes for balance changes. Resources are split between two areas which are not equally relevant to a single player. Monetization strategies becomes less efficient as it takes a larger investment to consistently target both populations. It just doesn’t work.

Most of the players on the PvP side of things see at least some potential. But many of us know with the current chain of events this potential will never be realized. Now what if a new game came out with similar combat but refined for pvp? Personally if what I have in mind was done, it would easily compete with league or other e-sports titles. A game with a campaign that gets peoples feet wet with the mechanics and objectives similar to sc2 then focuses on sPvP and realm vs realm. Though I would implement the realm vs realm substantially different than what has been done before. Something somewhat similar to alliance battles with more instanced missions that determine control of a territory.

Julius.1094:

The whole notion of “SPVP doesn’t bring income” is such bullkitten.

MMO PvP is notoriously bad at being a main source of income.

MOBAs have a solid formula for success, if you make a tri-lane map with a few core concepts and create abilities in a general way… you will have good PvP.
MMO PvP isn’t quite that easy to make, at least atm… with most dev teams being trash and PvE players being so easy to entertain… well it ends with MMO PvP typically being a second rate feature…

The main reasons I’m having a huge issue getting myself or friends into spvp is as follows.

1. Rewards are horrendous. I’m level 19, played 3 games took about 40mins (hot join). Gained barely half a bar. Played a 2-3 ranked games, barely gained a bar and it took about 30mins. I do this in PvE I could have made 2 gold, leveled up, etc. There is very little satisfaction in playing PvP.

2. Can’t tell what is going on and I get frustrated. Way to many flashy animations going on at the screen that seeing call animations for very important skills in a fight is very hard. I end up just spamming dodges or randomly using all my defensive skills when I get low because if I try to watch it I get a headache from the colors or get kitten ed off that I can’t tell whats going on.

3. Lazy meta. Right now the meta just feels lazy. Ranger summons pets and autoattacks. Hammer warriors just hop around swinging their AoE stuns. Eles ride the lighting in, use a bunch of high damage AoE skills, then run in circles healing themselves. Engineers run in cricles spamming bombs. I can go on and on, everything just feels and looks spammy.

4. Lack of game modes to keep things interesting.

cymerdown.4103:

• Bugs! There are still SO many bugs that exist with all 8 classes a year into the game, and some of these bugs are part of the class balance issues. If you go and look on the wiki you can see most of them, I really don’t know why more of these aren’t being addressed over more minor things like tooltip mistakes.

I think Grouch is now working at anet and has been tasked with aggressively dealing with bugs. Just take a glance at the bug forum and he’s posting all over the place. He has asked in the profession forums like 3 days ago to start posting your game bugs directly to the bug forum (“his domain”)

Kavia.8249:

cymerdown.4103:

• Bugs! There are still SO many bugs that exist with all 8 classes a year into the game, and some of these bugs are part of the class balance issues. If you go and look on the wiki you can see most of them, I really don’t know why more of these aren’t being addressed over more minor things like tooltip mistakes.

I think Grouch is now working at anet and has been tasked with aggressively dealing with bugs. Just take a glance at the bug forum and he’s posting all over the place. He has asked in the profession forums like 3 days ago to start posting your game bugs directly to the bug forum (“his domain”)

Man this is so cool he is like the lich king of the bug reign !

I’m all for increasing rewards (items, rank, glory, etc) for solo queue and team queue to make them more comparable to hotjoins; but, I do not think glory rewards for hotjoin should be lowered, made contingent on winning, or other changes unless other aspects were changed.

Rewards are already considered bad enough based on a general consensus of the forums, making it worse for hotjoiners to get rewarded is only going to make it worse for those players. If you want impetus for players to go into solo and team queues then ADD rewards to them as opposed to taking rewards away from hotjoin.

IF you were to make rewards contingent on winning a hotjoin and/or not zerging then the ability to join whichever team you want from observer mode needs to be removed … or some other method of randomization introduced to disallow hotjoin team stacking. Hotjoin team stacking has already got to be a huge detraction from pvping for new folks coming in trying to learn … every one expects to lose when they are first learning, but being completely demolished is another matter altogether.

There is a ton of good suggestions and feedback here i hope that i hope the devs are reading! In regards to the balance issue i think that as long as the balance team and the pvp devs are separate entity’s this game will not have any sort of balance when it comes to pvp. Trying to balance this game for WvW PvE AND PvP with no to very little difference from one game mode to another is just plain stupid, what applies to groups of 25+ zerging a keep does not apply to groups of 5 trying to win a capture point style of game of pvp and what applies to groups of people trying to do dungeons and kill npcs with 10000000000 health again does not apply to pvp ESPECIALLY in this game it seems. Many of the things mentioned here that would be good changes for pvp such as less dodge rolls, the spamability of condis and condi removal and the huge amount of over the top CC’s are things probably do not apply to pve and wvw and if changed would probably cause some big waves in those 2 game modes and if that is on the balance teams mind as they attempt to balance this game it will not work.

This realy is a great thread, i support nearly every point made here. Let’s hope the devs will recognize it.

the scoring supports zerging and off point killing. It’s stupid and needs fixed.

However, I like my pvp fast paced and with less tells. It feels more realistic to me. Positioning and experience are VERY important. Everyone seems to want to slow things down, remove the twitch… BLAH

Cast bars and normalized models would make me quit GW2. Make the animations more robust and unique, sure. More game types, YES PLEASE. Otherwise, you noobs need to shut up and learn to play.

Really, if you see a dude swining a big hammer at your face, you dodge. I don’t need a cast bar telling me if it’s a fierce blow or hammer shock so I can ‘decide’ if it’s worth burning a dodge. It’s good as is.

Draugl.8079:

This realy is a great thread, i support nearly every point made here. Let’s hope the devs will recognize it.

not to be doomsdayish but I heard almost every single suggestion or point here on the beta forums over a year ago. I don’t think devs make major decisions based on player feedback, it just influences the priority of which thing THEY want to add.

Course this is just going off the clues they’ve given over their first year. Companies sometimes change their policies or hire new talents and throw out the bad. Here’s hoping for the people who enjoy this game!

I don’t think any of this feedback will matter in the end. I don’t think the game devs of GW2 are passionate about the game at all, and just don’t care. They think they’ve done a perfect job and anyone saying otherwise is just “haters gonna hate”.

It kills me because this game could be so much more and I had so much friggin faith in Anet especially after GW1.

I so wish I was wrong, even the complete lack of communication shows it.

Zinwrath.2049:

Draugl.8079:

This realy is a great thread, i support nearly every point made here. Let’s hope the devs will recognize it.

not to be doomsdayish but I heard almost every single suggestion or point here on the beta forums over a year ago. I don’t think devs make major decisions based on player feedback, it just influences the priority of which thing THEY want to add.

I work for a software company (not in gaming), and this is exactly how it works for us. We LOVE feedback, it means we never are short of ideas… If we have a ton of requests for something that’s fairly easy to implement, it’ll probably get in. If it’s too far off the roadmap or would impact other things, probably not. Ultimately though, it’s our sales and marketing execs who decide product direction. Likely GW2 is the same.

TGSlasher.1458:

Conquest and Rewards
We all know the game was built around the conquest game type. I mean, anyone seriously thinking of team death match should consider the lack of Healing classes in this game and the meta of, spike the targeted foe to win.

Deathmatch arenas place an aura buff on all players for the match duration that decreases all incoming damage (including condition damage) by 30% and increases all healing by 30%. Fixed. That’s pretty much all they’d have to do to make it work, specially with the fact people can rez each other.

That would be so much fun as it would open up a whole different style of play and different builds, plus the healing buff would bringing abilities that heal others a lot more valuable as they are atm undervalued (and for good reason really, conquest doesn’t need a bunch of team heal builds to drag out fights even more). I fail to see why both modes can’t be available, if/when this game ever gets templates switching builds between the two would be super easy too.

garethh.3518:

Julius.1094:

The whole notion of “SPVP doesn’t bring income” is such bullkitten.

MMO PvP is notoriously bad at being a main source of income.

MOBAs have a solid formula for success, if you make a tri-lane map with a few core concepts and create abilities in a general way… you will have good PvP.
MMO PvP isn’t quite that easy to make, at least atm… with most dev teams being trash and PvE players being so easy to entertain… well it ends with MMO PvP typically being a second rate feature…

Old school MMO’s had monthly fees, so they made money from both pvp and pve regardless. New generation free to play MMOs have only been around for a few years. That’s not even remotely enough time to claim it just “can’t work”, it’s also ridiculous. It just needs to be done smarter.

Old school MMOs struggled with pvp because of: gear treadmills and balance problems. The first is a turn off for mainly pvpers because most want skill to be the differentiating factor, not gear. It also made entering pvp (where not only are you still learning but most of your oponents outgear you) really kittenty. That’s just stupid design not some fundamental, unavoidable flaw. GW2 in fact, fixed it.

The second issue is that balancing PVE and PVP does not work, general abilities can be the same but the numbers and the tuning should be totally different, and some abilities should be PVE/PVP only, there should also be separate balance teams for each. This is where GW2 has not succeeded, a few steps were taken towards it but, not nearly enough. This again is a planning problem, not some other unavoidable flaw.

Lastly for free to play games like GW2, once you create a vibrant pvp community by building in a lot of great features that covers all the main basis (which GW2 has failed at), balancing well for pvp specifically and getting rid of gear threadmils you need a steady stream of cool but non-play to win things to buy, GW2 has had some of this, but not enough and even if it was enough the player base is too small due to all the other shortcomings. It’s not that “MMO pvp” can’t make developers money, it’s just that bad people are doing it wrong.

Knote.2904:

It kills me because this game could be so much more and I had so much friggin faith in Anet especially after GW1.

I owe my love of competitive gaming to Guild Wars 1 that game was a huge part of my childhood and still to this day i apply the lessons and things i learned in gw1 not only to other games but to real life. It didnt matter that some of the balance was a little questionable at times (Hexway, Heroway, Iway, EoE bomb) the quality of the gameplay and community made sure that gw1 stayed fun and exciting. I still speak to 6 of my former guildmates and a few other friends from GW do any of them play GW2? no none….they all now play either LoL or CS and we are all of the opinion that GW2 is basically a huge slap in the face to those of us who played Guild Wars. Obviously some things were going to be different in GW2 no one was expecting the same game (Althought i saw someone suggest they just re release GW with better graphics, jumping and a few other changes and i can tell you right now i know MANY people who would play the hell out of that) but i feel like the only thing they carried over from GW was the name…..Why forsake GvG and HA two of the greatest pvp game modes in the history of competitive gaming for a conquest game mode that is very 1 dimensional?? HA already had a conquest map or two….it was one of many many game modes HA had to offer!!! Am i the only one who feels Anet took a step backwards there? ALSO where are the Automated tournaments?? that is another groundbreaking thing that GW did and did well that should have been planned to be released in at least the first year of GW2! Another mind blowing thing is the reward system we have here, the GW reward system after they released pvp only items was and still is miles ahead of the GW2 reward system….why?? I do not mean to be negative or put the Devs or Anet down but i truly do feel like this game in its current state is a huge slap in the face to those of us who loved GW

Some truly great responses here. I’ll throw my opinion into the mix here as well.

1) CC – every game needs CC. It adds a dynamic to game play and is seriously needed. However, too much CC becomes an issue because taking away the ability of a player to control his character is not fun. CC should be quick firing with a long cooldown. You could make it so that if there is no “interrupt” that the skill then has a shorter cooldown if you want. It needs to be strategic in it’s use, not something that is spammed or chained.

2) Conditions – Conditions are such a problem right now for 2 reasons. First, there is no defense against them. There is no “toughness” equivalent for conditions and thus it makes them the best option for killing people. Some will say vitality is a way to attempt to soak up condition damage but vitality comes at the cost of damage and/or toughness and really isn’t a “defense” against condi’s. There needs to be a stat that reduces condi damage like toughness does for direct damage. 2nd is the prevalance of damaging conditions. Multiple classes should not all have access to the bleeding/poison/burning/confusion etc. When this occurs there is A) no class diversity and no reason to not stack condi classes on a team.

3) AI and Passive Gameplay – Spirit rangers, Phantasm Mesmers, Turret Engi’s (ok they aren’t that strong) and MM Necros (to a lesser degree because minion AI is just plain horrible). There is nothing challenging nor fun about passive gameplay. Take these pets and get rid of them (I get that rangers need a pet, one is fine). They only serve to detract from engaging gameplay and make targeting and team fights a pain. Enhance other skills and create new ones (ranger shouts instead of spirits?) that allow for more active gameplay and less passive play.

4) Balance – for the love of all that enjoy this game, give us a public test server. There are people that have great ideas, give good feedback and are willing to spend time testing things that may or may not make it into the game. I see no reason at all other than some sense of warped pride or stubborness as to why Anet as a company will not trust it’s players in this regard. This game needs a PTR to help ensure the balance that Anet states they desire so much. I know there are internal testers and players that are invited to test changes, but I can tell you from the last patch (that made necro’s and condi’s so OP) that obviously they are either biased or there aren’t enough of them. Trust your player base, lose your ego and allow players to help you in the areas you need help.

I love this game. I want to see it succeed, but I think there needs to be an overall change of attitude by Anet and the developers if they are to help this game succeed. My opinion is that the above points are the serious things that take away from the “fun” of the game.

bump, because bump