Guild Wars 2

Insignya.8625:

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.

You realize this is the sPvP forum and Jonathan is strictly a sPvP dev? Take your silly, overdramatic PvE complaints to a person who is actually is involved with it.

They are promising quality of life improvements in october. Lets see

All this being said…Why is sPvP so dead?

Highre.5704:

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.

very much agree with you. anet made 3 game modes and they all require different balancing. i know it does take a lot of time to do it, but it is important. if anet keeps buffing the classes only around spvp, wvw will suffer greatly.every day when a commander asks in ts to state the profession they are playing atm. it is mainly guardians and warriors very closely followed by necros and eles. i barely see an R for ranger poping up and when we portal golems its hard to find more than 3 mesmers.

so yeah finding a sweet spot for an easier balance is not an option at all! it is not working and the crazy stat of the warrior is proof of the balance fail

I just want to say: Thanks

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

Since you refuse to split skills because it’s more work, and because you personally only care about the sPvP playerbase, balance in other game modes is only going to get worse than it’s already poor state.

And while I’m sure you’d refute the claim that you only care about the sPvP playerbase, this thread is a great example of your favoritism. You’ve gone to the effort to make a thread in the sPvP forum, full of long posts about balance to reassure sPvP players.

Yet meanwhile look at your post history:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/JonathanSharp-7094/showposts
In your last 120 posts, over nearly 6 months, only 10 posts aren’t in the sPvP forum.

For someone who’s meant to be responsible for balance of all game modes, you clearly aren’t interested in the balance concerns and opinions of players of game modes that aren’t sPvP.

Bottom line is, the fact that the team responsible for class balance is the same team responsible for sPvP is an enormous conflict of interest, and that greatly damages balance in the rest of the game.

What I don’t understand is they keep saying they won’t balance for 3 modes, yet they ARE doing split balance changes already… even in the Sep 3 patch. “Grasping Dead only applies 2 bleeds now in pvp”…. So.. which is it?

Mif.3471:

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

Since you refuse to split skills because it’s more work, and because you personally only care about the sPvP playerbase, balance in other game modes is only going to get worse than it’s already poor state.

And while I’m sure you’d refute the claim that you only care about the sPvP playerbase, this thread is a great example of your favoritism. You’ve gone to the effort to make a thread in the sPvP forum, full of long posts about balance to reassure sPvP players.

Yet meanwhile look at your post history:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/JonathanSharp-7094/showposts
In your last 120 posts, over nearly 6 months, only 10 posts aren’t in the sPvP forum.

For someone who’s meant to be responsible for balance of all game modes, you clearly aren’t interested in the balance concerns and opinions of players of game modes that aren’t sPvP.

Bottom line is, the fact that the team responsible for class balance is the same team responsible for sPvP is an enormous conflict of interest, and that greatly damages balance in the rest of the game.

u pointed out some good stuff here. i think the balance team needs more people, because the game modes do have to be split. there is really no point in finding a sort of middle solution for 3 completely different gamemodes.
u cant even closely compare a gamemode where there is more 1v1 4v4, 6v6 with a game where 30vs40, 60vs 30vs45 happens, trebs, ac’s, ballistas, catas, cannons, guards,mortars, golems with mass cc and mass condi spams…..

here a few examples:

before various patches made to the warrior:

warrior,extremely up in spvp due to slow and very predictable attack moves. in wvw always pretty strong, due to toughness, healing and dps. now anet buffed the warrior multiple times,because of spvp= warrior completely out of control in wvw. it sometimes takes 5 people to take 1 warrior down.

mesmer: always very strong in spvp, due to the whole dueling role. before glamnerf, pretty viable and fun to play in wvw: after a ton of nerfs, (and overnerf of confusion) mesmers are now squishy, have barely any aoe dmg, have a hard time to tag, clones die instantly, phantasms drown in zergs and now mesmers are forced into support roles and have to veil the warriors,tw the golems and try to hide in keeps to portal and then yeah the got nullfield which is nowhere near as good as a necrowell that turns condis into boons and boons into condis.

ranger: pretty much the rarest class u will see in wvw, while they were super popular in spvp, we laugh at spirit rangers in wvw. bm was also nerfed too harsh in wvw as it was actually somewhat viable there, but again anet nerfed it because of spvp.

now that they already stated that they dont wanna split the balancing, im starting to lose hope. according to sotg warriors shouts will get buffed(o.0), staff ele will get buffed(o.0), mesmers are fine(o.0…in spvp yeah, not in wvw) and necros will receive a little shave to their condis(o.0…..erm 1stack of bleed reduction is not really what the necro in wvw needs, chain fear, mass condition boms need a big shave imo). let me guess, next thing is u wanna buff the guardians too?

so anet, please hire a few extra people and split the balance! all i see atm in wvw is massive warrior/guardian/necro trains with ele support and maybe 1 or 2 mesmers for veil.

When we will have a sPvP patch ? With a lot a fun, please

And stop pve update, because just a seekgroup for sPvP, it’s rly rly poor…

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

Yes!!! That is one sentence I never thought I would read!

I think a lot of the players would also enjoy not only what you are working on but why the change is being made. A lot of players don’t understand theorycrafting to a full extent they just know the build they have has worked for them.

This may also help players build better builds in the future. Helping a good Meta form easier.

Just a short blurb like you did in Guild Wars 1 would be nice.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/This-Game-Has-Changed/first

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

That’s a really good approach. Thanks for taking the time and effort to include the player base more in these things.

This is essentially an alternative to having a test server. Test servers are absolutely amazing for fixing stuff like this, but it has several inherent problems and sometimes just isn’t logistically practical. It seems so easy to ask for something like that on a forum but seriously, a test server can create as many problems as it solves.

Or instead of that, ur boss could hire more dudes and do it (honestly, if i were ur boss i would do the same, no point in wasting too much resources in spvp).

What i think is bad for the game and avoidable is that balance is done 80% of the time with spvp in mind, when it’s the least played and the balance of pve or wvw is way way worst.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

That’s awesome. If it isn’t too much work (it probably is), it would be interesting to see an explanation behind those changes. Although some players can understand them by themselves, most players will not understand the logic behind most nerfs.

Baldric.6781:

Or instead of that, ur boss could hire more dudes and do it (honestly, if i were ur boss i would do the same, no point in wasting too much resources in spvp).

What i think is bad for the game and avoidable is that balance is done 80% of the time with spvp in mind, when it’s the least played and the balance of pve or wvw is way way worst.

Honestly, what does PvE need balance with. Almost anything is effective given experience and time.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

When i learned that balance patch is coming at oct 1 i thought “lets take a break”..But your post gave me reason to play till oct 1

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

Thank you very much for this! I really hope the community can give you unbiased feedback, keep it positive, and point out potential dangerous combinations that you might have missed, or weaknesses in some proposed changes.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

Chap: Thank you. We have been begging for this forever.

balance, balance, balance, balance, we can’t have more in sPvP please ?

I know balance is important, but sPvP players need fun. When you played one years in sPvP, you are just so tired… I think we need more contained, and visible contained. I know that anet don’t want to separate all his community, but sometimes its beter to separate than to lose your community.

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

Fun factor doesn’t care about how many hours you have in a week to do balancing separately, though.

While I agree with the basic premise, I can’t see the argument against just not changing something in PvE when it literally requires a separation, and not separate balance. Worrying about future balancing, I guess?

Most of the split balancing issues occur from when something is changed from its current form, not that (i)t isn’t being changed. As a rule, sPvP mechanic changes do benefit PvE too, it’s just the edge cases.

I guess it’s all up to interpretation as to what ‘beneficial’ means.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Killsmith.8169:

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 thakittentakes 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?

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

Ignoring the edginess of the comment — While I see your view, just saying it’s more work doesn’t make the opinion wrong.

We do definitely have three different games here; I guess the main thing to take away from the dissenters is that maybe a little more time should be put into prioritizing which changes should and shouldn’t be split, but that’s a matter of opinion mostly.

Having the balancing be a little more transparent and being given more time to chew things over should go a long way in ironing out these details, so I’m happy that you value that link. We need it.

Thedenofsin.7340:

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

I don’t think he is HR! =) I think you should raise a formal complaint to the relevant authorities.

Anyway, whoever has a job understand what his post is about.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

That’s wonderful and I won’t hold it against you if you end up talking alot and saying nothing par the course but, if instead of making statements like

We’re going to reduce the rangers passive survavbility
(How? Why? )

and isntead say things like

We’re going to reduce the healing co-efficient on Signet of the Wild by x% (We’re not sure yet), and reduce the duration of regeneration applied from skills and traits by 1 second or so.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

this is good.

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

You argue that to split skills you have to spend more time and resources, and that is obviously true.
However your choice as the developer is not to just spend more time or less time on balance, the choice is to make 3 bad game modes with shared set of rules spending less resources, or create 3 good game modes with appropriate sets of rules spending more resources.
For us, the players, it is obvious what you have chosen. In the end, it is skins and recreational stuff that bring you money, not the quality of fundamental game mechanics, so that is where your resources are going into.

P.S. And by “you” i mean A.net

Chokolata.1870:

They are promising quality of life improvements in october. Lets see

again? maybe i has a bad memory but so far they are promising some stuff every stog what gets repeated the next and the next.

pick the first stog video on the guru-channel on twitch and u will be amused how similar it is with the last one if u skip the balancing stuff.

hooma.9642:

Chokolata.1870:

They are promising quality of life improvements in october. Lets see

again? maybe i has a bad memory but so far they are promising some stuff every stog what gets repeated the next and the next.

pick the first stog video on the guru-channel on twitch and u will be amused how similar it is with the last one if u skip the balancing stuff.

Anet is a lot o fthings, but I don’t think they ever talk about stuff UNLESS it is ready. At best the only thing they will says is they are working on it, which is a code for “we probably are not working on it or we have TOP MEN on it.”

They promised one month that they would focus on bug fixing and the actual # they addressed was disappointingly low.

I have the feeling this will be the same case in october because they are relying on “next patch” again and every aspect of this game has over-hyped and under-delivered.

Thedenofsin.7340:

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

They are hiring people. Just mainly for the game mode that actually brings in the money.

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

Now I’m curious to know what your current process is. Do you just decide on changes and then get another department to implement them or do you decide on changes and implement them directly? How does it get done?

Doesn’t balancing all 3 game types at once ensure that your scope never decreases? Even if you’re happy with, say PvE, the patches to fix other game types will degrade the PvE balance until you have to spend resources to bring it back in line. And those fixes will nudge the other two out of line. What if you over correct and don’t spot it? Then things will get even worse. Worse still, what if the only answer that works for all three game types is incredibly boring?

I wouldn’t say that I’m theory crafting here. This has been my personal experience in my career as an electrical engineer, whether it’s hardware or software. Inevitably, I come to a point in a project where I have a few choices in implementation. Each choice will work, but one implementation will usually save me a lot of headaches in the future when I’m supporting the product, but at the cost of additional time during initial design. For me, that choice is easy. If I take the extra time up front it’s better because there’s always the possibility of multiple orders. Support problems get multiplied, but the design effort only occurs once.

Maybe it’s different in your line of work, but usually being able to get something running smoothly without it interfering with anything else has a great ROI in the long run.

silvermember.8941:

hooma.9642:

Chokolata.1870:

They are promising quality of life improvements in october. Lets see

again? maybe i has a bad memory but so far they are promising some stuff every stog what gets repeated the next and the next.

pick the first stog video on the guru-channel on twitch and u will be amused how similar it is with the last one if u skip the balancing stuff.

Anet is a lot o fthings, but I don’t think they ever talk about stuff UNLESS it is ready. At best the only thing they will says is they are working on it, which is a code for “we probably are not working on it or we have TOP MEN on it.”

i hope u reread ur comment.. so u basicly say im right. i always hear “we are working on it” or “we are discussing it”

i know unless there comes a newslater with a subliminial self prise nothing will change.

silvermember.8941:

Thedenofsin.7340:

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

They are hiring people. Just mainly for the game mode that actually brings in the money.

mmh by some odd reason i was thinking not the gamemode brings the money, the state of the mode. or will u argument pve in a state like pvp would bring in money?

at some point the milking of pve has reached it max before looking greedy. so a good manager knows what potential income can be generated elsewhere in the game. with your logic anet needs to implement another mmo before maximizing the full potential of gw2 cause some odd ppl thinks the gamer plays the game before it gets polished..

by the way why they even implement games without knowing it will selled how much. why we dont send all gaming companies a procent of our salary to be sure they start working on something we might be wanna use at some point?

your logic is total wrong.. thinking the egg came before the hen

“if u build it they will come”

JonathanSharp.7094:

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.

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 thakittentakes 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?

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

Just to drive this metaphor firmly into the ground. Based on what I’m seeing and reading, the people that are evaluating your classwork (i.e. the players) are fairly strongly of the impression that you are doing all three of your classes primarily in English and hoping what little Greek and Japanese you’re sprinkling in is good enough to get by.

BTW – I don’t think you’re passing those secondary classes at the moment, but everyone is hoping you’ll be able to pull it together.

actual he is wrong: time is a RESSOURCE, directly inflicted by how many ppl are working on something. i see no reason why u still discuss a clear excuse for poor design, developing and management.

I think a lot of this balance concern for different game modes comes from WVW and how imbalanced things are there, due to higher stat gear, food and less controls.

Jonathan, can you name a single skill or ability which is balanced separately for WVW?

With that being said, are you aware of the sheer difference in damage a killshot/backstab/eviserate etc can do in wvw compared to pvp? Do you think 521 spam on thieves is balanced (black powder, spam HS, 8k backstab, run away, repeat every 3 seconds) or fair reward for the skill cap (minimal) required? Or using Cloak and Dagger of ambient mobs during a fight to escape or gain additional stealth that wouldn’t be possible in a pvp setting. Worse with a 3s revealed throws pvp balance out of the window (hence the daily thread in the wvw forums complaining about thief balance). With the additional healing runes added and sentinel gear, warrior regen is beyond what should be possible. Or how engineers die from retal when their usual weapon skills are not designed for a wvw environment? These situations, and many more, all exist in wvw.

Or simply said, how do you think the pvp community would react if perplexity runes were added to pvp in their current state (for those who don’t know, this is a pve runeset where the 6th rune inflicts 5 stacks of confusion for 10s on interrupt, no ICD. So any class which can spam interrupts can now spam confusion better than a mesmer ever could. Hello s/p thief, cc engine, cc warrior. I’ve even seen BM rangers run these…) There hasn’t been a balance update, or any note from any developer regarding this, yet they are completely out of balance in wvw? Why? Is this really not ‘worthy’ of your time? I’m pretty sure wvw is far more active than pvp will be any time soon….

To a lot of people, wvw is the only game mode which allows straight 1v1 fights, as you don’t have to worry about point control and can actually design your gear with a lot more variety allowing more builds and synergy with traits/utility skills. Yet the constant complaints stem from the fact the entire balance in wvw is based around a completely different game mode, with different stat combinations and limitations. This creates an unfair situation, especially when you balance around a build in pvp which may not be viable outside of pvp, and said balance ruins the build in other game modes.

tldr; WVW is a different game mode with different dynamics yet is balanced around small man point control situations. I do not comprehend how a developer can justify this. Please prove me wrong by addressing the above points if you choose to, though I fear this would be ignored as usual.

Also, thank you for the upcoming balance transparency, looking forward to it!

I’m not going to write a book.

Please do not let professions fall to the ways of previous Guild Wars 1 failures in viability. Eg. Paragon, assassin

Yes, they sometimes were there. The other 98% of the time, they weren’t.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

that should be the standard procedure but coming from you I doubt you will post this info. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever before the patch is out…

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

Nice!

Please do a Balance Patch Preview like the ones Riot Games does for League of Legends! Thats a pretty nice way of giving us a heads-up of incoming changes while explaining why some of them changing. This, if you have the time-resources to do it

I really like GW2 , i enjoy all 3 modes at different times , but lets not kid ourselves , they have no clue how to design an E-sport . If they ever released patch notes even a few days before release, they would be smashed on the forums . That is why they do it at the same time as they release the patch , because nothing can be done and players have to accept it .

I so wish for a SOTG where the developer is pushed and called on his bullkitten . Never gonna happen though

JonathanSharp.7094:

Killsmith.8169:

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?

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

Have you SEEN the way your balancing handiwork has shifted the metagame from bad to worse? The quality really can’t degrade much further.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

Its been a day :P..I dont want to push you but im so excited about it :P take your time(not all of it if you can :P)

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

This feels like one of those imgur posts where the OP finds an unopened safe and promises to post the contents of it later.

…yep

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to be more transparent with balance, so we’re going to be posting a list of the things that we’re working on now, so that you guys can see balance changes earlier than usual.

I’ll post that in a bit, hopefully today.

I bet rest of Anet doesnt like transparency!And i bet that rest had a word with mr.Sharp?!
Lol man..come on we are waiting to throw as a bone for so long

I was just able to catch up on some forum reads and found this one. I understand this game is not perfect and I also understand that there are only so many hours a day for the GW2 team to make it better. The best part about this game is the communication. Now some will cry and say I never got a reply to my post, well as stated there is only so much time that can be spent on replying before you take away from the progression forward to this game. So I wanted to take the time to say thanks to Jon for posting and providing the Pvp world an update like this. Keep up the good work team and can’t wait for the post you promised yesterday about upcoming PvP fixes and such! Thanks

hooma.9642:

silvermember.8941:

hooma.9642:

Chokolata.1870:

They are promising quality of life improvements in october. Lets see

again? maybe i has a bad memory but so far they are promising some stuff every stog what gets repeated the next and the next.

pick the first stog video on the guru-channel on twitch and u will be amused how similar it is with the last one if u skip the balancing stuff.

Anet is a lot o fthings, but I don’t think they ever talk about stuff UNLESS it is ready. At best the only thing they will says is they are working on it, which is a code for “we probably are not working on it or we have TOP MEN on it.”

i hope u reread ur comment.. so u basicly say im right. i always hear “we are working on it” or “we are discussing it”

i know unless there comes a newslater with a subliminial self prise nothing will change.

silvermember.8941:

Thedenofsin.7340:

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

They are hiring people. Just mainly for the game mode that actually brings in the money.

mmh by some odd reason i was thinking not the gamemode brings the money, the state of the mode. or will u argument pve in a state like pvp would bring in money?

at some point the milking of pve has reached it max before looking greedy. so a good manager knows what potential income can be generated elsewhere in the game. with your logic anet needs to implement another mmo before maximizing the full potential of gw2 cause some odd ppl thinks the gamer plays the game before it gets polished..

by the way why they even implement games without knowing it will selled how much. why we dont send all gaming companies a procent of our salary to be sure they start working on something we might be wanna use at some point?

your logic is total wrong.. thinking the egg came before the hen

“if u build it they will come”

They don’t have to milk PvE which they are not actually doing at all, for the most part. They simply have to release new skins and players generally will pay for it and it doesn’t require any programming whatsoever, but simply designers tools (which they probably do).

Anyways, you are wrong in A LOT of ways:
1. the type of people that generally PvP are far less likely to spend money on the cash shop to buy gems.
2. They are more ways to monetize PvE without having to spend significant amount of resources. They are very few ways to monetize PvP, short of the player buying a game box.
3. They are more players in PvE than PvP, no matter how good your PvP is. gw1 had everything a PvP players would dream of, but the thing that kept the game up was the PvE.

“if you build it, they will come” only works if they are no competition around. However, they are a lot of different games that players can get their pvP fix on AND they is no guarantee that those players that you hope to get will even come back.

Jon, are these “leaked” balance notes that are floating around the ones you intended to share with us?

Edit: Well, they began locking those threads, guess I got my answer :S

Hope there is something for Earth shield in there too.