Guild Wars 2

Feranor.2053:

TL;DR

Wvw is not the equivalent of 8v8 in this game.

Tpvp is the equivalent of 8v8 in this game.

You should have spent more time in tpvp and giving it a shot. It’s exactly like 8v8. You need to pop certain abilities to save your team or revive them and get that rez or stomp, etc. Coordinate on who’s going where or what secondary objective is happening etc.

All that and being able to play your class well.

If you were looking for wvw to replace 8v8 for you then you were simply wrong. AOE in wvw only hits 5 people. You literally cannot fight a zerg with only 5 people unless you kite them.

I am from daoc also.

swinsk.6410:

Feranor.2053:

TL;DR

Wvw is not the equivalent of 8v8 in this game.

Tpvp is the equivalent of 8v8 in this game.

You should have spent more time in tpvp and giving it a shot. It’s exactly like 8v8. You need to pop certain abilities to save your team or revive them and get that rez or stomp, etc. Coordinate on who’s going where or what secondary objective is happening etc.

All that and being able to play your class well.

If you were looking for wvw to replace 8v8 for you then you were simply wrong. AOE in wvw only hits 5 people. You literally cannot fight a zerg with only 5 people unless you kite them.

I am from daoc also.

What are you talking about? sPvP is instanced point capture. RvR is open world death match. Complete opposites. And we’ve done plenty of 10vs60+, it works. There’s just no point to it because death means nothing in WvW.

@Chap – It was too long for me to read. You know me :P. I like to keep moving and grooving, but I am glad that you typed this up. Many players don’t understand how much you care about Guild Wars 2 pvp, and not just because it’s where you make your money.

A little story, when I was at a specific event not named Pax. I got the opportunity to sit down and talk with Sharp and Allie – (Allie watches Sharp when he talks to me like a hawk :P). I spent 3 hours in one day while watching Starcraft II learning about both GW2 and Starcraft from Sharp. He explained his vision for GW2 and the level of skill he wants for the game.

I will say that coming away from that time I was impressed with his explanation of what they were going for and towards. As well as how he saw certain things. I still want him to appear on our Profession podcasts if allie will ever let him :P.

Having said all that, there are several things that Chap mentioned during our meeting that I have yet to see.

1). AoE is overboard with no penalty. Everyone agrees, that there should be a drawback for spamming AOE abilities, there is no reason we should have 5 classes, and each class be able to spam damage and debuffing abilities that hit all 5 of the enemy for the same damage to each. It leads to a ridiculous visual and easy mode.

2). Both Builds and Play should matter. This hasn’t happened as you can play an entire pvp game without ever dodging and it’s just fine.

3). The major changes should be tested ahead of time (this one wasn’t agreed by Chap), but I really think it’s essential for the major patches to be tested on a pts in order for players to find the bugs that the devs and community managers can’t find.

For me as long as the AOE is easily spammed without any negative drawback. It’s too much. Currently the only professions that have a negative for any strong positive is the Ranger and Warrior. The Mesmer can’t break into the cycle because there is too much condition aoe and it’s too easily ran.

I enjoyed GW2 and feel it has great potential, but the sad state, Chap is that the only skill involved is should i activate this aoe now or later. No skill shots, no way to counter stealth outside of spamming aoe and getting lucky, no negative to just spamming aoe conditions, and AoE doing as much if not more damage than a single target ability leads to a very low skill game.

A simple question, John: why can’t Anet hire one or two people to literally spend all day going between this forum and the class forums replyingto feedback? Would it really be that bad to have a dedicated forum guy/gal?

I will say I agree that you guys to get harsh treatment and is not needed etc. I actually feel bad a lot of times and I try to be nice. But since the game industry has become more about money and less about a passion of the game, I have notice less and less competence and care with games themselves which has cause me to be more angry to see the thing I loved ruined by greed.

First I say this to not sound mean but I am trying to be constructive with my critism.

I have to question your staff with some of the mistakes, amatuer mistakes, I have seen in this game such as trying to a one time world event? WoW attempted this and we seen how it turns out. WoW solved pet issues in big boss battles and dungeons which this game is not really that far from different. Even LoL uses this concept with the spiderling pets for Elise and that is not even an MMO. Then there is the bugs which I know with programming there is always bugs and they can be real pain to flush out especially when the bugs are cause by things completely unrelated like casting mage armor crashes you because a new boss was put in the game. But there has been bugs in this game for months if not the full year that remained unfixed and while there is always expected to be bugs I feel this game has exceeded the line of acceptable amount to unacceptable amount.

The first examples 2 things are very simple things that should of already been learned from and not repeated. That is why jobs want people who have experience so such silly mistakes aren’t made again right?

As said before, I don’t say it to be mean but I really feel that in some shape or form whether its lack of experience in games, designing or just not really caring, that some of them at least really do not belong in the field or perhaps need to take on different work improve their experience. You said you are human like us right? Then just like with other profession some people are just bad at what they do. We seen it with with very important professions such as doctors and nurses so it can happen with even game developers.

Incurafy.6329:

A simple question, John: why can’t Anet hire one or two people to literally spend all day going between this forum and the class forums replyingto feedback? Would it really be that bad to have a dedicated forum guy/gal?

I’d have a feeling that not many people would honestly want that job for long unless they had really thick skin and were quite succinct with what they said, and then left the conversation (instead of trying to debate). There is a ton of abusive language that flies around the forums directed towards ANet, and while some of it is understandable, I’d hate to sign up to hang the “kick me” sign on my back and then calmly walk through a crowd of people with steel toed boots.

Fuzion.7613:

You guys kittened up the pax tourny, That is all.

Arganthium.5638:

Fuzion.7613:

You guys kittened up the pax tourny, That is all.

How did they do that?

Bas.7406:

Arganthium.5638:

Fuzion.7613:

You guys kittened up the pax tourny, That is all.

How did they do that?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Countless-Thought-s-On-Pax-Tourne/first#post2749102

make heart of the mists free2play = or sell it to riot games!

make lovely leagues: bronze silver gold platin master grandmasterleagues.
give me some pvprewards =gold, gems, titles, epic weapons, skins, backpacks, finishers, new pets & spirits for my ranger :P

I just have to comment that the defense for not splitting skills prettymuch solidifies my take that Arenanet bit off way more than they could chew, and like so many areas of the game now, simply don’t have to resources to fully realize their original grandiose plans.

Trying to create an esport while having to force it to work within the constrictions of two different types of game play is simply not working out, and as result there is an over abundance of excuses and promises, and very little, delivered very late.

You can orate all day long to the fan boy choir if you wish, but if you cant provide 3 separate types of game play (wvw, spvp and pve) without dumbing them all down to an fitful compromise, perhaps Arenanet needs to rethink things.

In CoD … its TDM or Hardcore TDM, no secondary objectives, nothing else matters as there is so little population on those other servers and queing for those other game types … well lets just say that whoever came up with P2P for multiplayer games needs to be shot, or live in Australia for more then a week

Long story short, people want to kill each other. A game is a “Safe” system, free from prosecution found in killing people in real life. Therefore when it comes to games, we like to break the rules of civilised life.

With GW2’s lack of trinity and high TTK (time to kill), making TDM would be quite a difficult venture. Strategies like target 1 and drop him would immerge and everyone knows how unbalanced the game is when you are 1 man down.

When it comes to a game like Halo, the TTK is about 1 second. So focusing is less optimal and trying to take the enemy individually per team mate is usually a better option. If you are 1 or even 2 members down you can still fight back and win.

Feranor.2053:

What are you talking about? sPvP is instanced point capture. RvR is open world death match. Complete opposites. And we’ve done plenty of 10vs60+, it works. There’s just no point to it because death means nothing in WvW.

You must have missed all the towers, camps, keeps and Stonemist Castle.
WvW isn’t deathmatch at all, it’s point capture (Even uses the same circles as sPvP you have to stand in) with walls to break down first.

People who think WvW is a deathmatch are trying to play a gamemode that doesn’t exist.

Darnis.4056:

C-c-c-c-c-c-combobreaker?
Nice one fernling

Keep on chugging Jon; we all want this game to thrive.

lol too funny -_-

Thanks for the post Jon!

JonathanSharp.7094:

• This post was written while under the effects of Radiohead and tea, earl grey, hot.

+1 for Radiohead

I Might Be Wrong, but you sound like you have Everything In Its Right Place.
As for all the whiners I wish they would just learn How To Disappear Completely.
And remember, Anyone Can Play Guitar, but not everyone can play the marriner’s horn.

Interesting, that’s actually the first time i’ve seen devs post something like this regarding pvp in any mmo i played. Quite nice to be WRONG about about my view on all mmo devs that don’t care about anything but milking money from pve base, all while slowly scaring away pvp crowd.

Thing i wanted to note though, and it’s quite a big mistake i’ve seen alot of devs do in their games…
They make those priority lists with major, medium and minor problems. Problem is, all devs, you guys included, focus only on major and medium problems, leaving minor one’s behind, which leads them to NEVER getting fixed.
For me, and many people i know, minor things that may seem like not a big deal for you guys can be a major thing. For example things like Engi Static Discharge being worthless with any non-target utility, Blunderbass being lower than melle range, Vampirism Runes being horribly buggy, Grenade kit 1 not being auto-castable…
Also Charr shoulders floating high above the model and weapons having very noticable size differences when dual wielded, making you never want to pick this race because it just looks silly…(actually i guess its’ the main reason why people don’t play them much)
Really, i even wanted to leave gw2 myself because of those things, just like some of my friends did it for similar reasons because i understand that they may never get fixed.
All those things make game so much more limited on builds, it’s ridiculous… Bleh, just go to wiki an read all class’s bugs sections there, you will find many that are still in game.
All those little things seem minor but they make this game look so horribly ignored by devs, that players that do care about them will never come back, because they realize that those problems may never get a fix…

And how to deal with it? It’s simple actually, every patch you make should include majority of big problems, some medium problems and at least some minor problems you have… Thankfully they are minor for a reason, and that actually makes them much easier to fix. But they are always ignored and never get fixed…

Another thing i want to note, really, nobody likes playing against 9 midgets with unreadable animations, make all players have a glowing ascalonian soldier skin, colored differently if team colors option is enabled please, this will make a game much less ridiculous looking, and much easier to read. And yeah, by midgets i meant asuras.

How about you leave all the changes you see these silly little spvp players complaining about, in spvp.

How about you check out the WvW world, and help out there more.

Perplexity Runes would be fixed already if they were in S/Tpvp, but you wouldn’t know what’s wrong with them would you.

S/Tpvp will never be an E-Sport.

Tricare.2946:

How about you leave all the changes you see these silly little spvp players complaining about, in spvp.

How about you check out the WvW world, and help out there more.

Perplexity Runes would be fixed already if they were in S/Tpvp, but you wouldn’t know what’s wrong with them would you.

S/Tpvp will never be an E-Sport.

SPvP is like the spoiled 4 year old….
The one inflated like a balloon because the parents keep cramming kitten down its throat…

Be happy WvW doesn’t have any of that attention.
WvW is playable right now.
WvW has people playing it (last I checked).
S/TPvP is for all intensive purposes smothered and dead.

http://files.enjin.com/225050/img/anet_forum_suspension_api_cm20.png

Put your mods on a leash, quit making promises or excuses and engage in actual conversation with people instead of telling highly irrelevant stories.

Hello,
I’m sure we all can agree that the rifle is a dying breed, right? Here are some ideas that I think would make it a more viable tool.
1. Increase Bleeding Shot’s attack speed by 30-50%
2. Aimed Shot immobilizes enemies for 1 second and applies 5 seconds of 50% movement impairment.
3. Volley always penetrates through enemies with or without the trait.
4. Brutal Shot no longer has a cast time (instant) and removes 1 boon from your enemy target.
5. Rifle Butt will have you lunge (increasing the rang to 350) towards the enemy and then butt them for a 1 second knock back.
6. Cast time of Kill Shot reduced to 1 second instead of 1 3/4 time.
Please let me know what you think of my ideas and feel free to pitch your own ideas here. Let’s get the devs attention, thanks!

Forums are the most toxic part of the community. You say black so they say white. In all honestly i would stop looking at the forums if I was a dev. Even if some of these players are the best players going, who cares? they make up 2/3% of the community?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Countless-Thought-s-On-Pax-Tourne/first#post2749102

Those are good points.

What i noticed when playing Wow is that the patch notes on the public test realm were always posted up. I can tell you that about 50% of them never came to live or got toned down severely. The community also had time to respond…and point out things that the dev’s may have missed or overlooked usually class forums are much less toxic that PVP ones, although most forums have a tendancy to echo, if someone who is high rated/famous says something that’s the only way it can be done. Which obviously isn’t true.

This is a great filter….now i watched a stream and you said some players don’t want to test the game for you. Who is forcing them onto a test realm? nobody. Its completely optional.

Expect Toxic forums full of nasty stuff, its funny because they would never speak like that to someones face but being anonymous makes people horrible.

First off I’d like to say that I love this game. It has great potential. I came to this game looking for that PvP scene so many others have stated. I was looking for that next Dark age of Camelot feel which is why WvW appealed to me so much. I did that for about 7 months of this games life, but I just couldn’t stand the AoE limit, Zerg ball mess that you guys call open world pvp.
So I moved over to the Spvp/Tpvp side and really enjoyed it for the first 20 ranks or so. Then all the flaws started popping up. Gaining ranks or skins or even gold takes six times as long in PvP then PvE. Why is this? Cultural armor starts at rank 60? Are you kitten kidding me. I do not believe it should take a year to implement a simple revamp of this system. It is pathetic to even say it is being worked on. You have a new living story every 2 weeks. You guys can’t even merge the mist together so that your tiny PvP population can get to know who is left and play together. I feel kind of embarrassed that I recommended this (PVP) focued game to my friends, by the way quit after a month or so.
I think most of all the community would like Anet to communicate better with the super ultra secret patches you have coming for us and allow us the people who probably love your game more than you do, to actually test your patch and find the things you may have overlooked. While you guys kick back and watch the current meta, fix the kitten reward system. I think all people want is access to skins that PvErs can get after 1 month of play. For a PvPer it will take 2-3 years? What are you kitten smokin over there? Take a team or two off living world for a month and strickly work on pvp content and tell the community you are doing it and what you are looking to change. You guys are way to quiet about your game.
Anyway I will keep playing for now, at least until another so called PvP focused game comes out to disappoint all of us again. It still amazes me that 10year old games have better matchmaking or leader-boards when they were running. I can’t even kitten search on your site, I have to use a player made website. You should probably hire that guys since he can make a better product and still play your game. I have great hope that you guys can save this sinking ship, but it will take a major overhaul and huge effort, which from the way things look seem to on the last of your priority list.

Break down:
1.) Communication with community need improvement
2.) Revamp reward system
3.) Balance, I’m okay with slow, just communicate. Let us test.
4.) Stop being so secret, you are not the government.
5.) Merge the Heart of the Mist, you need to get the player base together in order to save this game mode.
6.) Leaderboard and/or in game Scoreboard revamp. Search function, Kills/Deaths/Caps/Healing/Stomps/Wins/Losses. Why after 1 year none of this for pvp game?
etc….

It’s funny to see what the devs get accused of. When I left spirit ranger was basically useless. Now people say its OP. And to accuse Dev’s of being behind this because they want pet rangers. LOL.

Whenever I think ‘how do people get these crazy conspirarcy theories’ about things in life, I need look no further than any video game forum where people post on the various shadow dev conspiracies. .

I want 2 things:
1) Deathmatch arena
2) Duel Mode

I know people will QQ even more but it will just be …. awesome!

Reax.1806:

I want 2 things:
1) Deathmatch arena
2) Duel Mode

I know people will QQ even more but it will just be …. awesome!

Hell duel mode is something so small but so awesome at the same time, we definitely need it soon.

As for deathmatch I can see their concerns and how they want to add things like capture points or flags in a deathmatch mode, but a pure deathmatch would be great, just great(and I also believe that adding secondary objectives on DM it would spoil the fun of DM itself.)

Build the best team and train it to kill everyone else, I know that this is what I want to do.

It’s not just about balance though.

The biggest issue with spirit rangers, necromancers, s/d thieves, CC warriors, halting strike mesmers, etc. isn’t that they’re “overpowered.” The issue is that it doesn’t take that much effort to play them at a level that is (currently) top tier. Yes, there is a LOT of room for individual players and teams to improve, and this will drastically change balance, but what’s the point when no one is (currently) good enough to beat people that are literally spamming abilities?

For example, I believe that before the “necro patch” warriors and necromancers were viable the way they were. It just took higher levels of teamwork and coordination. Unfortunately when I finally got a warrior on my team, the patch hit, so I never got to see for sure. In the same light, I think that Guardian/Mesmer/Ele/Ele/Ranger was viable in the current meta, but it just takes far more effort to play than something like Guardian/sd Thief/Necro/Spirit Ranger/Engi.

The reason why you don’t see top level teams, like ours, using these other comps is for a number of reasons. First, it’s clearly possible to not only switch comps, but learn these builds from scratch in less than a week and do extremely well. Our team, and team curse, did just that, as we both went to the finals by ditching the builds we loved to play, and instead played these new meta builds.

A lot of people didn’t believe, and some still don’t believe, that these builds are really that easy in comparison of pre-patch builds, and where builds should be in general. I think the above proves that yes, they really are that easy. And this is the issue, not necessarily overall balance.

Another reason why you don’t see anything different than the meta builds is because of the restrictions for the PAX tournament. There were a good amount of teams that had to reform, which means they had very little time to find replacements and bring up teamwork and basically effort to make non-meta builds/comps work. I’m not complaining about the restrictions, but the issue is with such little time to prepare, why try something that’s exponentially harder to play if we don’t know if it’s necessarily more effective?

For example, our team was running ele/ele/mesmer/guardian/ranger and we were doing OK. We had a lot of room for improvement, and we were definitely getting there. The issue was we had to replace one of our eles, and we could not get another ele that could replace him. Even if we could get another ele, who says we could get back to where we were, and then progress even further (which was needed if we wanted to win) in time for PAX? We ended up getting an engi and changing the comp entirely because it was just plain easier. But at this point why bother going back to our old comp? In the process of trying to improve our play and teamwork, we’re going to be slaughtered by people that not only are doing none of that, but they are also literally spamming their abilities. That’s not even fun, so what’s the point?

And the thing about this game is that everyone copies what the top-tier teams are doing. It’s always been like this, and honestly it will probably always be like this until there’s a lot of competition to diversify top-tier teams. At this point I really don’t see teams playing anything other than these easy builds, especially since hard counters are being introduced (cc warriors!). It just contributes to the cycle, and is more of a “bandaid fix” for the horrible meta, than anything else.

Basically what I’m saying is the devs seem pretty excited that their engineered hard counter is seeing success. Yeah, it might improve “balance,” in the sense that more things are viable, or that the FOTM isn’t “uncounterable,” but at what expense? This is honestly the wrong direction to take the game. It’s the path WoW arenas decided to go down, and look what happened there (it started dying, and was honestly pretty bad as a competitive game).

It’s one thing to increase build diversity, but it’s another to ignore how easy it is to be effective with it. This is an issue that’s been in the game for a while, but this patch has only magnified it. I’m not saying this is easy to do, but it has to be done if you want this game to be successful. You also have to balance around the skill level that is currently present, not around what is theoretically possible.

This is what people are upset with, and I’m hoping that one day you will understand that. The game would be in a much better spot if you gave more credit to the players that have tried playing this game competitively for the last year.

Good luck.

daydream.2938:

It’s funny to see what the devs get accused of. When I left spirit ranger was basically useless. Now people say its OP. And to accuse Dev’s of being behind this because they want pet rangers. have no idea what they are doing. LOL.

Making one of the kittentiest most passive specs to play, instead of fixing it to be a more strategic, active team buffing, spec… they outright buffed it to top tier quality…
That is a disaster waiting to happen… and for devs… devs that so obviously care so much about this game… to repeatedly do things like that… it just means, they are utterly incapable of helping GW2…

People get kitten y when that happens, when a game they really want to succeed flops so hard because of kitten like that.

You could at least tell me that this was not guildwars 2, at the start of the game we had free tournament and paid tournament and that was nice, then you have removed them for no reason and now in pvp what we have? nothing. Classes are more kitten than before, we have no healer no support, now a bunker can’t hold a point vs warrior or other classes for the many stun/fear/daze that they have compared to the cooldown of the stability skills of the guardian and for this we cannot make tactics, good job. Dont forget to put some more super adventure box, dynamic events or new set of armor in the future patch! we absolutely need some new pve stuffs!

JonathanSharp.7094:

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills. Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types. This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games. As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

Chap’s woefully ill-conceived attempt at a metaphor on why we don’t spilt all skills off the bat: Imagine you’re in school, and in order to make sure you learn languages at an even pace, you have to split everything you do into 3 languages. For me, let’s say it’s English, Japanese and Latin (No, Greek, I liked learning Greek more than Latin). You start off answering a question on a test in 3 different languages. You rock. But then you do it more and more often. For every note you take in a lecture, you have to write it in 3 different languages. For every paper you write, you have to write it in 3 languages. For all homework, you have to do it in 3 languages. Every test. Every quiz. It may seem small at first, but if you’re not careful, you’re doing three times the work as normal.

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

The way you’re doing it now, you have to come up with a fix for one game type that doesn’t effect the other two too badly. I would argue that it takes more work to do that than it does to split the skills and balance to solve issues unique to each game type. The upkeep shouldn’t be costly at all, you just don’t fix what isn’t broken. What could be more cost effective than that?

Strange to see the comments about trying to keep the 3 formats (PvE, PvP, WvW) together. The other two formats are clearly acting in obvious dysfunction with the PvP side of the game and making sure people never get the time to set foot in PvP; as if that wasn’t already obvious with the separate Glory reward system that is only minimally allowed to help someone’s PvE progression. It looks to me like higher-ups are creating internal competition between design teams and encouraging them to polarize their own fanbases so that it looks like they have done a ‘better job’…

And with the most recent patch, the lead PvE designer has cemented the decision to require people grind out multiple ascended weapon and gear sets per character (or get a legendary). PvErs also have the constant Living Story busy work being added to ‘help’ grind out achievement busy work. And the lead WvW designer has already gone totally off the deep end, and continues to actively divorce WvW from it’s PvP roots. Catering towards already stacked servers, 10000 rank grind per character, as well as the aforementioned Ascended gear requirement. And since it is still (or could have been) a PvP format, the multiple gear/weapon sets are required due to the distinct differences between roaming, zerging, and defending dolyaks/bases; and that’s ignoring how popular dueling and GvG have become as side interests along with all the trait/rune/sigil combinations to test out. The option to explore the game is being designed out.

But between those two, theres plenty of sigils, runes, AI objectives, and broken consumable buffs that make the WvW game play less and less like PvP. WvW is more PvE than ever with the current rush to trade bases so that the Ascended grind can be finished with. The PvP side has to admit to itself, it’s going to lose if it tries to totally do it’s own thing, because it would isolate the game’s stars from the game’s players. WvW can’t carry the game’s marketing because top WvW guilds were never really that good; and everyone else they went up against was just months behind.

PvP absolutely hasn’t kept pace with the disturbing and chaotic re-envisioning of the game being done by the other designers; not that anyone really can, as evidenced by the constant complaints… Ok, so you added Skyhammer, ignored feedback about it, and now it foreshadows (to the skilled parts of the community) where this game is actually going (towards mini-games and not sport). With every addition to the PvE game, it becomes painfully obvious that the resources to fix major problems exist, but they intentionally won’t be used to support any healthy growth of this game.

Killsmith.8169:

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

I find this statement true and QFT.

Thanks for the heads-up Jonathan.

(And Radiohead is awesome – In Rainbows is pretty underrated)

Killsmith.8169:

JonathanSharp.7094:

-Too long post to quote-

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

The way you’re doing it now, you have to come up with a fix for one game type that doesn’t effect the other two too badly. I would argue that it takes more work to do that than it does to split the skills and balance to solve issues unique to each game type. The upkeep shouldn’t be costly at all, you just don’t fix what isn’t broken. What could be more cost effective than that?

I fully agree on it and love the debunking of the arguments given before. They cannot really fix anything properly if they try to balance all 3 types together.

Fuzion.7613:

You guys kittened up the pax tourny, That is all.

@J sharp

As you mentioned splitting skills is very costly. Not to sound like a kitten but i remember you mentioning splitting skills for pvp a year more ago in order to make pvp more competitive and that way it would not interfere with the pve crowd. If its to hard to do why even bother mentioning it and suckering so many pvpers into playing your “esport game”.

Point being you guys promised way to much before launch and got the pvp community riled up. You guys are now scrambling to pick up the slack. Is it to late? I think it is for the majority of pvpers. They have moved on. Most of us saw the lack of pvp attention from anet from the beginning and left.

1 year later and the pvp is no better off than it was at launch.

Now as for arenas or team deathmatch. I disagree with your out look on it wholeheartedly. TDM requires a lot of skill and instinct and also luck which i find fun as kitten because it gets your adrenaline going. Sitting on cap points in my opinion is boring as kitten. Being able to coordinate strategies on how to eliminate your opponents is much more fun and entertaining. You keep comparing tdm to fps which irritates me. One, because in fps shooters you die instantly(Headshot-Dead, Grenaded to face..dead etc…. TDM in gw2 will not be so easy when every class has a heal and the down state creates for some interesting situations and fights. Not the mention the different team combinations.

As far as mobas go i played all the big ones and i can tell you killing in those games is very important. Holding lanes is only good for early game situations. Once the game is rolling its full on pvp.Ganks early game in mobas are fun to watch because they are so hard to accomplish. Also, teamfights in mobas are more enjoyable to watch because gw2 balance is so kittenty everyone rolls the same traits and skills(DOTS). Mobas provide more variety(heroes,gods).Gw2 conquest in my opinion does not provide entertainment or the fun to watch factor. I think most players will agree and after seeing your top pvpers leave it should give you guys a good reason to rethink your strategy.

After a year and after hearing so many people complain on how we hate spvp conquest mode. you should consider re prioritizing on what you want and the players what they want. After waiting since 07 when the game was announced you guys advertised gw2 pvp beyond what was given to us at launch and even now… As a gw1 player i can sincerely say i am disappointed in the way you and the rest of anet has handled gw2 pvp. I enjoyed the combat thank you for that! I don’t like the direction you guys took pvp and the way you treat the pvp community.

Good luck on your progress on force feeding conquest down peoples throats instead of listening to what people actually want.

Yes my writing comprehension sucks. Hopefully i made my point good luck J Sharp.

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

Killsmith.8169:

JonathanSharp.7094:

-Too long post to quote-

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

The way you’re doing it now, you have to come up with a fix for one game type that doesn’t effect the other two too badly. I would argue that it takes more work to do that than it does to split the skills and balance to solve issues unique to each game type. The upkeep shouldn’t be costly at all, you just don’t fix what isn’t broken. What could be more cost effective than that?

I fully agree on it and love the debunking of the arguments given before. They cannot really fix anything properly if they try to balance all 3 types together.

yeah agreed.they have to be split. what is powerful in spvp, is weak or useless in wvw. wvw is dominated by classes that are multi tagret strong. a duelist class like mesmers is only ok for roaming, but in a zerg u have to stay back and spam nullfield, veil, portal golems, tw golems and u can baraly keep up with the zerg due to our out of combat speed. same with thieves they are great at ganking people and dolys, but in a zerg the can only pick on the leftovers.
warriors are out of control in wvw due to all the spvp buffs. guardians would need buffs in one area, but are too much in the other area. rangers are nowhere in wvw. necros have been buffed because of spvp, now they are a must take in wvw and also too strong. so yeah ty anet for your awesome balance and ty for not splitting the 3 gametypes. ty for ruining the fun i used to have in wvw and now its a warrior/guardian/necro train vs veil/tw/portal bot mesmers as duelist means nothing in wvw unless u wanna go roaming.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

You can orate all day long to the fan boy choir if you wish, but if you cant provide 3 separate types of game play (wvw, spvp and pve) without dumbing them all down to an fitful compromise, perhaps Arenanet needs to rethink things.

Delete pvp and focus on pve and wvw. Try pvp again in Guild Wars 3. Atleast that way there could be two good game types.

That was pretty cool to read. But when people say ‘ANET’ doesnt care about pvp, they dont mean to include you in that. They mean the higher ups i guess.

Also i do think a gamemode can be good if its only one room, some line of sight objects and maybe some elevation if a lot of people like that, whether something so simple is good enough depends on if the game feels like it rewards quick thinking and reactions and thing like that. I believe GW2 can make some improvement in this area instead of ‘side objectives’. We got those already.

This is an MMO, not a shooter where everybody plays a ranger, there is diversity in skills in classes if done well. The exclusion of other side objectives is actually one of the things that draw me to deathmatches.

@J sharp. This is one of the interviews you got me hyped to play gw2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9mARxB2aLM

You let me down

Just remember that balancing is a give and take, and isn’t exclusive to any one individual class. To get best results you gotta put away the ego and at least try to see others’ views.

You’re a man after my own heart Jonathan. Really well written post/s.

No, you don’t LOVE this game. If you did you wouldn’t be doing your very best to turn it into every MMO out there.

Stop being so overly dramatic. I’ve seen devs get cut off mid-way by the publisher, being forced to release early and have their entire company shut down along with the servers supporting the game. You’re “emotionally fatigued” because you had one convention to go to? Consider how monumentally lazy every update of GW2 has become. You turned to grinding, because it’s the cheapest, most non-innovative method of churning out “content”.

I’ll believe the developers of GW2 love their game when I see dynamic events that matter, zerging in WvW fixed, world bosses made epic and so on. All I see is the next carrot-on-a-stick. That’s not passion, Sharp. You want to see developer passion, go see CD Project Red. You just turned your game into a generic MMO, in 2 years you’ll go Free-to-Play and then what? Will you still be preaching your love for GW2?

Also, negativity getting you down? People used to provide structured, extensive criticism. And then they got tired and started whining. Why? Because you never bothered to reply to a single post. You hide behind pathetic interviews and blog posts that refer to some version of GW2 none of us have ever played. If you want players to take you seriously, come out and say “yeah, this is fundamentally broken, we heard you so we’ll restructure our priorities and have an update for you guys. ETA 3 weeks.”

So spare me the drama. This game has been going downhill since the start of the year and Ascended Gear is the latest proof you have no desire to pursue innovation. Not because it’s hard to achieve or because it’s essential – because it’s a fracking gear grind, the same thing you said GW2 would never have. Now you have a gear-treadmill in a game whose strength was never to make people grind. You abandoned the strong points of GW2 (dynamic events, changing world, world-threatening antagonists, diversity in builds) and went for the tried-and-tested “Do X 300 times to get a new dress” or “collect Y 500 to get +1 health”.

I pity the designers of GW2. So much stunning, genius art, made redundant by gameplay that just doesn’t work in an MMO. Something your team refuses to admit to this day.

JonathanSharp.7094:

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills.

It takes more time than what? Predicting the consequences of a (batch of) change(s) across all 3 balance areas? In the long run, hardly. The initial split takes a lot (?) of resources, but after that the work of the balance team would be a piece of cake (compared to the entangled cluster-puppy it is now).

JonathanSharp.7094:

Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types.

So you’re saying when changing a skill it’s easier to find the sweet spot across all 3 areas (with the same number/coefficient/effect/whatever) than being able to tune the skill for each balance area individually? That seems like flawed logic to me. It’s less tech and QA work as it is right now, true. But the games balance would only benefit from the total split, because the 3 balance areas would no longer interfere with each other (what seems to be a problem, otherwise we wouldn’t have this discussion, right?)

JonathanSharp.7094:

This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games.

I think it’s time to realize that this is exactly what you’re trying to do all along. (Player vs AI; large group vs large group; small group vs small group)

JonathanSharp.7094:

As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

And exactly this impact causes the troubles. The last time I checked the saying went something like ‘divide and conquer!’ rather than ‘monolithicy (that’s a word!) for the win!’

If you want me to take your efforts for balancing the game serious then be serious about it and convince the suite people upstairs that splitting the skills is the only serious long term decision.

@Devs

Balance won’t make a bad game good, only a good game better.
Focus on making the game more engaging to play and you might actually get somewhere devs.

PvP MMOs are never balanced… GW2 is more balanced than most tend to be… yet others still have had decently large populations playing them…
Why?
The gameplay was well made.
GW2’s isn’t.
Fix the problem, not a problem.
L2Dev.

garethh.3518:

@Devs

Balance won’t make a bad game good, only a good game better.
Focus on making the game more engaging to play and you might actually get somewhere devs.

PvP MMOs are never balanced… GW2 is more balanced than most tend to be… yet others still have had decently large populations playing them…
Why?
The gameplay was well made.
GW2’s isn’t.
Fix the problem, not a problem.
L2Dev.

This x100. I think they could start from adding game modes that aren’t poo.

JonathanSharp.7094:

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills. Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types. This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games. As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

Chap’s woefully ill-conceived attempt at a metaphor on why we don’t spilt all skills off the bat: Imagine you’re in school, and in order to make sure you learn languages at an even pace, you have to split everything you do into 3 languages. For me, let’s say it’s English, Japanese and Latin (No, Greek, I liked learning Greek more than Latin). You start off answering a question on a test in 3 different languages. You rock. But then you do it more and more often. For every note you take in a lecture, you have to write it in 3 different languages. For every paper you write, you have to write it in 3 languages. For all homework, you have to do it in 3 languages. Every test. Every quiz. It may seem small at first, but if you’re not careful, you’re doing three times the work as normal.

I guess you should have thought of that before you split the game into 3 entirely different game modes that will undoubtedly require 3 different approaches in order to balance them.

If I were a dev I would have cancelled this vacation after seeing what an huge desaster pax was and how kitten ed everyone is.

On the one hand I think the rude tone these forums have gotten is bad, on the other hand: What are we supposed to do when we get slapped in the face day after day.

“Hey! We know how you feel, we know our game is unfun and were working on it! BTW were having an vacation and we like to watch movies.”

Throw your DVD player out of this window NOW and cancel that vacation. This is as if the captain of the titanic crashes his ship and goes on a niece vacation on some sunny island.
Then a month later he comes back to save his ship, guess what he finds?

Fix the largest issues, like S/D thief, OPmancer, Pettingzoo (ok, here you actually did something right for the 1st time since release) and stunlocking uber regen warriors who hide behind pillars in a 1o1 to let their regen save their butts.

Passion is cool, but fake passion isn´t. And either you just fake passion so people hang around a month or so longer, or you are so drastically underfunded that you should start some kickstarter project like “Save our sinking PvP”

[/endrant]

Sorry, but as an ex-passionate elementalist (and I mean truly passionate, like spending hundreds of hours trying to make a profession work which has been kicked down the stairs and abandoned by its creators) I´m rather stuffed up with how things are handled here…

In most cases, you don’t need to split skills, but rather just design them better in the first place.

Eg: 100 blades – very OP in PVE, balanced in PVP/WVW:
solution – make 100b usable while moving, decrease the damage to compensate, rework/tweak the animation as req’d.

Conan.8046:

What i noticed when playing Wow is that the patch notes on the public test realm were always posted up. I can tell you that about 50% of them never came to live or got toned down severely. The community also had time to respond…and point out things that the dev’s may have missed or overlooked

This. I think it’s crazy in 2013 not to be involving your customers in the development process. Bugs cost money, and players work for free.

Feranor.2053:

What are you talking about? sPvP is instanced point capture. RvR is open world death match. Complete opposites. And we’ve done plenty of 10vs60+, it works. There’s just no point to it because death means nothing in WvW.

8v8 wasn’t about 8vs60.

It was about 8 vs 8. Running island so no one interfered, etc. It was about team work and group coordination. Getting people up and buffed as fast as possible if they went down, getting cc off and not breaking it, focusing dps or interrupting, etc.

Tpvp is the same thing except you can’t bring your whole 5 to one spot normally because you have to keep points. It requires the same kind of communication and coordination 8v8 did. You get the same kind of satisfaction you would from a really fun and good 8v8 fight from a good tpvp match with your set team.

I’m not talking about about rvr, just 8v8. Tpvp is as close as you will get.

Death does mean something in wvw, it means you have to port back to nearest port, repair, and run back out. Just happens a lot quicker in this game than daoc is all.