Guild Wars 2

Great post. Agree 599% with what you said. I only wish ArenaNet would do something about it.

Hello. I’m not posting that often too.
I post because i think you post deserves visibility.
It’s full of truth and well thought.

Great Post.

Best Regards
Moktahr

Good post. I’d like to chime in only to say that in addition to the glacial pace and iteration failures, the balance adjustments that do happen also seem to be highly myopic – focusing far too intently on one specific use of one specific skill/trait in one specific game mode, for example.

They seem to frequently ignore both big picture concerns (like my thread on #1 skills), and how their changes impact other sections/modes when they shouldn’t or fail to impact them when they should, which contributes to the feeling that there are major, large imbalances in the game that simply go without any attention whatsoever for unforgivably large stretches of time.

Meanwhile, a very lackluster presence on the boards leaves players with nothing to assuage their frustration, which has continued to fester with no end in sight.

Great post, Mon! I agree.

If anet even wants to save face, I’d be happy just forgoing the admission stuff. Just reverse the trends.

What should honestly happen is a “stockholder meeting” with the player base.

Excellent post. I hope you will not be banned for speaking the truth.

I wholeheartly agree and I would also like to mention that I hope we go with an ELO system later. We have no metrics for our rating on the current Glicko-2 system thus not allowing us to thoroughly analzye our rating and its determinants and possibly take something new and helpful out of it. An ELO system allows for more freedom in rating too. (And thank you for linking my post :D)

“Aetherblade/Dhuumfire” patch. The patch that introduced Scarlet’s name and the destruction of PvP balance and fun. Thanks for the name. Let’s rally behind this, and tell ANet not to make another Aetherblade/Dhuumfire patch.

Excellent posts, makes a clear point and outlines the problems with the devs very well, especially how balance changes in general seem to lag behind.

There’s some work to be done, and personally, I’d gladly go without the fortnightly content (in fact, I hardly do it now anyway) if it meant more balance changes.

Between you making every excuse in the book on why not to balance it needs to be done already. If you can’t decide where you want your balance to be then re-write every class since you obviously failed at the core at that point. Where do you want the balance, did the nerfed ele become the new balance or the uber buffed warrior with the click it and forget it mentality become balance. Becuase I am telling you this, if I wanted another WoW I would be playing SW:TOR and if you keep going in this stupid route you are then I forsee you lose the last of your competitive mode and make this a game for kittens and puppies. Or is it your intent to push Wildstar as the next game?

Find your balance ANet, and service it. Warning: don’t go with the warrior current “balance” becuase no one wants to play a game where you click it walk to the kitchen and make a sandwich and come back anymore. You took a great build system and you have tossed it out the window because you refuse to balance your game and would rather deliver mostly god awful content while ignoring PvP with only god awful content, whether it be in implementation (WvW ranks) or new maps (sPvP) and this needs to be stopped. WvW ranks was nice and needed, the implementation chased away most anyone with more then one character. And don’t get me started on the maps, they may have been good with a different mode on them, but hell if we will ever see it with you guys behind this game.

To look at the same company and the two totally different games and how horrible they do at making a game for PvE players and not PvP. With GW1 keeping players in GvG and HA till the release of GW2 beta to GW2 failing to keep PvP players at all. Hell you look at most the competitions in GW1 and take those teams and they have all quit GW2. It sure sounds like you guys are focusing in the right area.

PS: Thank-you Mathias for saying all this and more to support my idea, since there is no way I could have got that out constructive

A quick fact to look at:
http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/gwwc/
That all started a year in to the game. Where is this for us ANet? GW2 PvP a failure yet, can you finally go screw this game-mode for small scale combat and leave it for WvW?

This post is what I’ve been waiting to see for a long time. Someone needs to immortalize this in stone. What the OP said summarizes my feelings on the developement path of this game. As a player, I feel that my trust was misplaced and that there are so many empty promises being thrown out.

An example is when Jon Peters came out on the ranger thread and said that they pretty much were never going to change ranger sword 1 because of the unique playstyle. One month later he posts that “it needs to be changed.”

I feel like ideas over there are all sorts of scrambled and that teams are just fightning among each other or making decisions on the fly with very little quantitative reasoning.

While the community should not completely define the game, they shouldn’t be ignored either. There has been months over months of great feedback on as the OP said, problems that should have been solved quickly.

Its terrifying when “OP bugs” come out like sigil of para or things like confusion runes. We get stuck with this horrible things for ages and ages, when they should be fixed in hotpatches.

When a BUG becomes meta for longer than a month, the dev and QA team has failed. I lost so much faith in the direction of this game that when I log in I just get angry. This just led to me eventually fading from the game and becoming very tight pursed about spending money on it -until eventually I went somewhere else.

Once you lose trust with anyone, your playerbase, your friends, your family… its so hard to get back.

I don’t know how they will crawl out of this hole. The only way forward is to be honest, open, and succeed at promises being made. This hasn’t been a track record for guildwars 2.

We are kept in the dark constantly, being told what we like in content, then get content we don’t like forced down our thoughts despite feedback so strong its nearly an online riot… I don’t know what else to say.

How could this happen to such a great title with so much potential?

Thanks OP! I really needed this read.

As a current WoW player wishing I could return to Guild Wars 2, this post is everything that’s keeping me from doing so. I love GW2 so, so much. The art is masterful, the combat technology is the perfect blend of action and RPG, and, barring Scarlet, the lore is pretty great at its heart.

However.

The game can go two directions from here, and it needs to decide fast.

It boils down to there should be no such thing as PVE/PVP balance. Only class balance. Scores of spells and abilities need only SIMPLE NUMBERS ADJUSTMENTS —- this is infuriatingly simple! —- to become viable or interesting! Might and Precision need to scale less, Healing Power more, and etc. Warriors need some flat nerfs. Period.

I’ll tell you what they need to do: Hire someone from Riot Games to come over and do a massive balance pass on their game.

As much as I am furious with Riot sometimes at their balance decisions, they get a few things right. They are precise, active, and intelligent. Arenanet —- I love you guys —- but you need a 180-degree turn in this direction yesterday. The only other direction is utter destruction, and I can’t come back to the game in the state it currently occupies.

As a clarification to the OP

Just a followup to my OP to further clarify my reasoning and thought process behind my topic.
One point must be made clear: The community should not focus its ire and negativity upon the developers, but upon the management, because this is where the mistakes are being made

Reading through the employee reviews at Glass Door Reviews should also be instructive as to what currently ails Arenanet’s project management and these concerns should – and must – be made more public if change is to be instituted.

To wit:

• The point of this topic is to galvanise the community to a state that pushes Arenanet’s project management in a more positive direction, because it is clear that the current course has its flaws.

• For all of Guild Wars 2’s flaws, it is a thoughtful exercise in innovation and a brave first step in producing the “next generation” MMO that discards old MMO tropes for a stronger game that forsakes the (majority) of the MMO Skinner Box

• It would therefore be a frightful waste of potential if the game was to be abandoned due to neglect in balance and polish in lieu of temporary content.

• Thankfully, we are now in a window of great opportunity for Arenanet to redeem itself and re-align its priorities:
  • Living Story “season” has ended, as has WvW.
  • PvP is clamouring for a shift in meta that has stagnated for months with stultified team compositions and a lack of content like game modes and maps.
  • Now, more than ever, is the time for Arenanet to shift its focus.

(Edit: deleted Glass Door review due to risk of derailing the thread)

We know, as a community from playing this game, that Arenanet is capable – more than capable – of producing quality gameplay within a quality product. Yet without a head, even the greatest teams working on a project will become a conflicting mass of priorities and problems.

This is what we are seeing right now.

This is what the community as a whole should push to correct, if the game is to grow and prosper into the future. To have it wither on the vine, poorly tended, would be the greatest tragedy that could befall one of the strongest MMOs yet released.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Great post. Agree 599% with what you said. I only wish ArenaNet would do something about it.

• The community has pushed for changes before, and they have gone through. Issues like Dodge queueing after Stun or diversifying Stunbreaks across all profession utilities – these are changes that have generally had positive results on build diversity. Relenting on Ranger’s Sword 1 root is also another example. Arenanet does listen, on occasion. Hopefully they do so again, on the most important ongoing issue of their company.

caporal moktahr.3408:

Hello. I’m not posting that often too.
I post because i think you post deserves visibility.
It’s full of truth and well thought.

Great Post.

Best Regards
Moktahr

Thanks. Despite prevailing forum attitudes that GW2 is going to hell in a handbasket, the general trend of changes has been positive – bar several major mis-steps. It is correcting their errors and changing their management stance that must occur if the game is to prosper.

Einlanzer.1627:

Good post. I’d like to chime in only to say that in addition to the glacial pace and iteration failures, the balance adjustments that do happen also seem to be highly myopic – focusing far too intently on one specific use of one specific skill/trait in one specific game mode, for example.

They seem to frequently ignore both big picture concerns (like my thread on #1 skills), and how their changes impact other sections/modes when they shouldn’t or fail to impact them when they should, which contributes to the feeling that there are major, large imbalances in the game that simply go without any attention whatsoever for unforgivably large stretches of time.

Meanwhile, a very lackluster presence on the boards leaves players with nothing to assuage their frustration, which has continued to fester with no end in sight.

Actually, Arenanet has shown considerably greater forum presence in the wake of community uproar since the Dhuumfire/Aetherblade patch. The mistakes committed demonstrated that any major change; no matter how rigourously tested internally, could have devastating consequences on balance once released.

A cursory glance through the Dev Tracker demonstrates that developers are engaging with the community, and on a minute-to-minute basis across all areas of the game. What happens as a result remains to be seen.

Collaborative Development and a willingness to engage has been demonstrated by the developers. Unfortunately, it seems that some of the topic results have been stymied by poor prioritisation, so their execution is lacking, if not for lack of trying.

Mbelch.9028:

Great post, Mon! I agree.

If anet even wants to save face, I’d be happy just forgoing the admission stuff. Just reverse the trends.

What should honestly happen is a “stockholder meeting” with the player base.

It is interesting to go through the Game Updates wiki category of GW2wiki to see the overall trends and changes to the game. Overall the game is more bug fixed than at launch and more skills and utilities are usable. It is just that their direction is lacking.

As for a stockholder’s meeting, CDI already has elements of this. I would hope that this time around, the execution is better.

Great information. And from a journalist (myself) I must say everything is well interjected.

Nice work, Mon.

Edit— just saw your reply to me. Yes, CDI’s work. But even on a larger scale. Somethun advertised frequently, taken place through twitch and scheduled to take several hours. I don’t think players on the forums are a great representation of the entire player pool. Just those willing or frustrated enough to actually communicate.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Excellent post. I hope you will not be banned for speaking the truth.

If they ban me, there are two outcomes:

• My ideas have been disseminated enough to result in a Martyr’s cry , and the community is galvanised to push for management change
• My ideas have not been disseminated enough, and the direction of GW2 continues unchanged, to the embitterment of all. GW2 goes down in history as “solid, but missing the mark” and history’s mistakes are repeated.

I would hope that – for the present and future of the company – that its errors are corrected. The video game industry is extremely consolidated as it is. To have the talent scatter to the four winds from neglect would be most egregious.

Rahar.9872:

Excellent posts, makes a clear point and outlines the problems with the devs very well, especially how balance changes in general seem to lag behind.

There’s some work to be done, and personally, I’d gladly go without the fortnightly content (in fact, I hardly do it now anyway) if it meant more balance changes.

• “Lagging behind” seems to be the operative word of the state of the game at the moment. If Arenanet is to catch up, it must recognise two things:
  • Arenanet cannot know 100% what its community wants. Testing internally is nothing compared to releasing it to the community that will use and abuse it to the full.
  • Likewise, the community sometimes does not know what it wants. Changes proposed could have knock-on effects that internal testing could not possibly reveal.

• Therefore the solution is to release more often, in the hopes that the hundreds of thousands of man hours spent by the community to collectively abuse the changes will result in a balanced result quickly. As the state of balance then becomes more dynamic, stagnation or stultification leading to community frustration is significantly ameliorated.

Neko.9021:

“Aetherblade/Dhuumfire” patch. The patch that introduced Scarlet’s name and the destruction of PvP balance and fun. Thanks for the name. Let’s rally behind this, and tell ANet not to make another Aetherblade/Dhuumfire patch.

• Overhaul patches in and of themselves are not bad, if issues identified after release are swiftly followed up upon. In this case, issues identified such as Sigil of Paralysation, Dhuumfire reducing TTK to mere seconds, Thieves becoming the meta roamer, Warriors becoming gods – these would all have been ameliorated if changes were swiftly pushed out to correct these imbalances.

• As it stands, the state of the game was effectively untouched until the passing of the PAX tournament. This is a mistake that cannot be repeated if Arenanet is to retain its veteran playerbase, already wary and jaded. If the issues that come up in March 2014 Rune and Sigil overhaul are not followed up swiftly, it will be the beginning of the end for GW2 balance.

• Thankfully, with the end of the WvW and Living Story season, now is the time for Arenanet to realign its priorities. If not to secure their playerbase, then to secure the future of their project. A digital industry in an age of social media cannot afford to leave mistakes to fester.

Sari.9836:

I wholeheartly agree and I would also like to mention that I hope we go with an ELO system later. We have no metrics for our rating on the current Glicko-2 system thus not allowing us to thoroughly analzye our rating and its determinants and possibly take something new and helpful out of it. An ELO system allows for more freedom in rating too. (And thank you for linking my post)

• Thanks for providing your statistical breakdown of the system. Having played other games that use Glicko like Dawn of War 2 amongst others, matchmaking in any PVP context is one of the pillars of a strong PVP experience – failures in which result in considerable player angst.

While I think your thread is very insightful and sparks good discussion, you might want to think twice about posting glassdoor reviews here. I’m not sure it’s the proper place. You might encourage people to go gain insight from those sites themselves, but what you’re doing here is kind of like walking up to A-net’s studio and drawing mustaches on pictures of management. It just seems off color to me, and at the very least might be cause for an unnecessary forum ban or post deletion.

I’d hate to see this thread get derailed or censored due to content like this.

Pawstruck.9708:

While I think your thread is very insightful and sparks good discussion, you might want to think twice about posting glassdoor reviews here. I’m not sure it’s the proper place. You might encourage people to go gain insight from those sites themselves, but what you’re doing here is kind of like walking up to A-net’s studio and drawing mustaches on pictures of management. It just seems off color to me, and at the very least might be cause for an unnecessary forum ban or post deletion.

I’d hate to see this thread get derailed or censored due to content like this.

My original intent of posting the Glass Door reviews was in hopes of demonstrating the point that it is the project management of GW2 and not its developers holding the success of the game back. That said, I recognise that it could be misinterpreted in that fashion. If derailment occurs, then I will edit my posts accordingly. But I do feel that it is important to the discussion to demonstrate why things are happening as they are, and the reviews are an important insight into the matter.

I pretty much agree with the OP.

Well said.

We’ve been in the game for 1.5 years and there are still persistent bugs and issues that are simply ignored, yet the pump out this living story content so quickly that it’s hard to even keep up with it.

It gets really old really quickly.

I agree with Pawstruck while this topic is excellent I feel that your glass door posts starts to change course away from profession balance and more to the general development of Guild Wars 2.

Excellent Thread !
You describe pretty well how balance should be done.
Now let’s hope this thread can get things to move in the right direction.

Excellent posts!! hope anet read it, new game are coming so with no fix a lot of active player could go somewhere else……

@OP: great post.

The problem definitely arises from the balance methodology that ANET employs. It simply does not work. Here is their approach:

1. ANET wants to increase build diversity and so they buff or nerf a trait
2. ANET ends up overbuffing or overnerfing based on their original intention

Now here is where it gets interesting. Most people would say the next step should be to modify what they previously changed. Instead the ANET approach is:
3. Modify a ton of other skills to try to compensate for what they over or under nerfed.

Just not a good balance methodology.

Since January 2011 Dota has had over 22 patches in 3 years.
League of Legends for the first couple of years since release had biweekly patches.

Those games have over a hundred characters each with at least 4 skills and numerous items to balance around with. The reason they didn’t crash and burn is in good part due to a quick iteration of balance patches based in good part on player feedback.

Why not copy the example of success?

Great posts! Thanks MonMalthias!

ArenaNet is just a clusterbag of groupthinkers. Telling a round-table of groupthinkers that “HEY, you’re compromising yourselves by just being all ‘Huggy, feely, no problems, guys,’” is not going to get them to stop. As that Glass Door review mentions, ANet needs leadership; they need someone to tell them what to do because they’re not going to do it themselves and they’re too stuck in their own ways to deviate from their current path. No one there has any initiative or backbone because there’s no need for it given the way that their work groups seem to be structured.

Pawstruck.9708:

While I think your thread is very insightful and sparks good discussion, you might want to think twice about posting glassdoor reviews here. I’m not sure it’s the proper place. You might encourage people to go gain insight from those sites themselves, but what you’re doing here is kind of like walking up to A-net’s studio and drawing mustaches on pictures of management. It just seems off color to me, and at the very least might be cause for an unnecessary forum ban or post deletion.

I’d hate to see this thread get derailed or censored due to content like this.

oZii.2864:

I agree with Pawstruck while this topic is excellent I feel that your glass door posts starts to change course away from profession balance and more to the general development of Guild Wars 2.

Pursuant to your concerns I have deleted the Glass Door posts. I do hope that there is enough momentum built at this point that the exclusion of them from the discussion will still be sufficient to prove my point that the priorities at Arenanet need to change.

On the overall point I easily agree.

Arena.net, you need to be more daring with your balance.
I know we tend to rant and whine and kick and scream, but in the end, we mind absence of balance changes far more than wrong balance changes or see-saw balance. It makes everything stale, and that makes everything boring, and that makes us not want to play.

I don’t mind skills breaking, bugs coming up, things going haywire. If I see the fitting number of changes each 2 weeks, that is.

If it’s on me, merge all balance changes red-hot as soon as the build server successfully deployed them to your testing systems. Let the players give you mass-data on viability.

Additionally, it’s curious to see how fast the living story teams can iterate (patches show clear signs of understanding previous patches’ feedback and improving upon them, example Scarlet invasion → LA invasion) considering their cadence of 2 months.

Contrary to the balance team, which seems to take 6+ months to iterate on a change.

And I really see the only solution in just patching balance changes hot. At least every 2 weeks, better yet weekly. We don’t mind weekly imbalance any more than weekly-the-same-imbalance-for-half-a-year. Seriously. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

Avigrus.2871:

I pretty much agree with the OP.

Well said.

We’ve been in the game for 1.5 years and there are still persistent bugs and issues that are simply ignored, yet the pump out this living story content so quickly that it’s hard to even keep up with it.

It gets really old really quickly.

Absolutely. Living Story is a revolutionary concept that should absolutely be pursued given the sky high development costs of producing a AAA MMO – however, Arenanet has taken this concept and run with it to the exclusion of fixing their game.

Honestly half the issues associated with the game at present – Defiance, Utilities and Traits being half-baked, build diversity and bugs – these are all emblematic of a forced early launch. Arenanet and their publisher NCSoft may claim that they had to launch because they ran out of money, but I do believe that the Mists of Pandaria release paid no small part in forcing their decision. This could all have been remedied had there been a focused effort towards finishing their game for the next 6 months post launch instead of working on Living Story.

Redg.9807:

Excellent Thread !
You describe pretty well how balance should be done.
Now let’s hope this thread can get things to move in the right direction.

Actually, this is an iteration of Sunshine.5014’s post The Root Problem, or how to balance PVP with a broader based perspective that enfolds WvW and PvE as well. I claim no credit to the original idea, but since the thread last month by Sunshine received no attention by developers, this is essentially an updated repost.

I hope I have galvanised some people with this thread, and more attention is called to this matter.

falyero.3078:

Excellent posts!! hope anet read it, new game are coming so with no fix a lot of active player could go somewhere else……

Absolutely. With Wildstar, ESO and other MMOs just around the corner, Arenanet’s window of opportunity to retain their veterans and attract new players to stay is gradually closing. Thankfully, with the end of the PvE Living Story Season with the fall of Lion’s Arch, and the finish of the WvW season, now is the time for Arenanet to buckle down and refocus on finishing their game.

style.6173:

@OP: great post.

The problem definitely arises from the balance methodology that ANET employs. It simply does not work. Here is their approach:

1. ANET wants to increase build diversity and so they buff or nerf a trait
2. ANET ends up overbuffing or overnerfing based on their original intention

Now here is where it gets interesting. Most people would say the next step should be to modify what they previously changed. Instead the ANET approach is:
3. Modify a ton of other skills to try to compensate for what they over or under nerfed.

Just not a good balance methodology.

Actually, the balance methodology can be described more accurately as thus:

1. Arenanet pushes out a release and lets players discover the “meta” builds and compositions after a few months
2. Balance changes are introduced addressing the more egregious points of the meta builds, but are overall relatively minor in order to encourage embryonic “off-meta” builds to be developed. Changes are often coupled to “feature” patches that introduce new content.
3. Bug fixes that affect balance are also coupled to “Feature” patches introducing new content, delaying their introduction.
4. Over time, Arenanet hopes to “shave” the apex predators and bring up the “off-meta” builds.
5. Every few months, a larger, more “meta shifting” release is produced, and the cycle repeats.

That is how it is supposed to happen, at least in theory.

What happens in actuality is:

1. After a new release is pushed out, players swiftly find out the strongest builds within the month. Bugs that affect balance are also swiftly exploited. A few threads are created regarding these bugs, and the teams may take it under advisement, but in general fixes are not exactly the highest of priority unless it affects the play experience of connectivity or serverside issues like skill lag or desync.
2. Shaves are introduced every month, but never in a large enough quantity to affect all meta builds. Matchups change a little over time, but some meta specs are abused and exploited for several months before being touched.
3. By the time the next “meta shifting” release rolls around, the changes accumulated are off base due to players finding the counter themselves, or simply joining the FOTM train enough that new specs are meta (actually a good thing; but it means that the release’s changes are disconnected from the actual point of balance.)

Kiriakulos.1690:

Since January 2011 Dota has had over 22 patches in 3 years.
League of Legends for the first couple of years since release had biweekly patches.

Those games have over a hundred characters each with at least 4 skills and numerous items to balance around with. The reason they didn’t crash and burn is in good part due to a quick iteration of balance patches based in good part on player feedback.

Why not copy the example of success?

Absolutely. Frequent balance iteration has been demonstrated to have achieved a more balanced result faster. Frequent balance changes also make the meta more dynamic, which prevents stagnation – something that Arenanet has failed to take into account when executing their longer term balance strategy. Mistakes made also have greater leeway for reversion, as the next release is only a fortnight away, such that periods of abuse can only last so long, and player frustrations cannot fester.

Skyhammer (and Skyhammer farming, which utterly poisoned Rank as a currency of player participation), Temporal Curtain Swiftness bug, Healing Signet, Ranger Spirit of Nature, and many many other issues have been left unaddressed and abused for months on end – an unacceptable outcome in any industry, let alone a digital one.

Swagger.1459:

Great posts! Thanks MonMalthias!

I am not the first. As I have said in a previous post, Sunshine.5014 was the first to coalesce these views.

Swagg.9236:

ArenaNet is just a clusterbag of groupthinkers. Telling a round-table of groupthinkers that “HEY, you’re compromising yourselves by just being all ‘Huggy, feely, no problems, guys,’” is not going to get them to stop. As that Glass Door review mentions, ANet needs leadership; they need someone to tell them what to do because they’re not going to do it themselves and they’re too stuck in their own ways to deviate from their current path. No one there has any initiative or backbone because there’s no need for it given the way that their work groups seem to be structured.

At the risk of derailing the thread, Arenanet does seem to have some issues with their management and upper management, but I have deleted those posts due to being off colour.

I do feel that the Balance team has its hands tied, however. Coupling Bug fixes and Balance changes to Feature patches is not a concept any rational balance team would entertain unless there were conflicts with other teams requiring that set changes be released with set content to resolve the issue.

Also with the number of consultants on team and with moving their QA to an external third party, I would think that groupthink would hardly be the source of their issues. The issue remains that there are priorities set by Arenanet, and Balance and bugfixing is not high up.

Excellent posts, Malthias. However, I fear that ANet has already missed the window of opportunity, unless a miracle happens. Most people I’ve been talking to, no matter whether PvP enthusiasts or dungeoneers like me, have already lost interest in the game due to the total lack of content updates. It will be virtually impossible to change the course of a big tanker like GW2 (especially with such a willfully ignorant crew – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at the “interactions” with the dungeon community …) before the upcoming MMOs – TESO, Wildstar, etc. – arrive. And as soon as that happens, a lot of people will leave.

CptAurellian.9537:

have already lost interest in the game due to the total lack of content updates

You mean balance updates? Either this is the wrong thread, or the argument makes no sense. The point is that they’re prioritizing the new content too much versus patching balance faster and more often.

Carighan.6758:

CptAurellian.9537:

have already lost interest in the game due to the total lack of content updates

You mean balance updates? Either this is the wrong thread, or the argument makes no sense. The point is that they’re prioritizing the new content too much versus patching balance faster and more often.

Both, in the end. However, I disagree with the description of the Unliving Story junk as “content”, but discussing that would stray too far from this thread. I’ll leave it here, since you’re right. I personally care more about (real!) content, but this would be the wrong thread for that.

As much as i want to agree with a fair portion of what your saying MonMalthias, the fact is, you make a lot of "statements’ that you either have no evidence what so ever to support, or are blind conjecture, or just your personal opinion. The problem is, you state them as if they are fact, then go on to continue working off of opinion and conjecture as the building blocks for your statements.

You make statement after statement after statement claiming this issue or that problem with Anets management, or balance team, or testers. MonMalthias, I have to ask, what do you do for a living, and where did you go to school? I ask, because to make as many claims as you have, and to word it as you do, to suggest you have some reason to have more insight then the rest of us, should at least come with come credentials.

I challenge you to prove your claims and exclamations. You make claims slandering management, you make statements about their processes for fixing bugs and balancing (while I doubt you have any more insight then anyone else on this and your statements are 100% assumption and conjecture), and frankly, a good portion of your wording is misleading and you make a lot of accusations as well as many disparaging comments in an effort to come across as is you have proof, facts, or special insight, when you absolutely do not.

I am all for expressing an opinion on the game, its direction, and what you feel about it. As well I am all for having discussions based on those opinions. But once you begin to pretend you have a clue about individuals, their jobs, how their processes work, how their structure actually functions, then make negative remarks and disparaging remarks, all i feel you are doing, is using the forums to promote the equivalent of your own personal blog. No where in your original post’s do I see you seeking other feed back or take steps to open discussions, you simply have 3 full post to open up this thread, all full of personal opinion, accusations, conjecture, and negative claims, with no real facts to support it, then continue your discussions under the pretense that all of your conjecture is actually true.

This lecturing, personal blog of yours, has no business here. You don’t appear to discuss any actually balancing discussions. Not to say that your opinion doesn’t have value or that this post doesn’t belong on the forums, I am more specifically referring to it being in the balance subforums. Your OP has inspired literally zero honest balance discussions, and should be placed somewhere more appropriate.

Why should this thread not belong to this subforum?

The TO says, that Anet should ..

• increase the frequency in which balance updates are applied to the game
• probably think about undo some changes instead of patching the game around them (dhuumfire and others)
• balance should be started at the roots (game mechanics), not at the leafs (meta builds)
  …

I don’t see why this should not be discussed here?
Probably some of the statements above are just assumptions, .. so what?
What the TO describes is how the players see their game/development.

But unfortunately no one is reading this and nothing will change.

coglin.1867:

-snipped for length-

Citations for most of his statements are not needed as they are based on very clear observation. ANet’s balance patches have been extremely slow with particular builds reigning supreme for half a year or longer. By comparison, other games with balance as a high concern patch very frequently (often every 2 weeks, the same rate as GW2 Living Story) with adjustments. Sometimes, they overdo it, but they also will admit their mistake as soon as it becomes clear and either revert or reduce the change they made.

At the same time, ANet makes the largest balance changes for professions at the same time they introduce some other change that affects things drastically. The upcoming March patch is a prime example, as any changes to balance will be unclear if it’s from the Rune/Sigil changes or the skill/trait changes.

Finally, when regarding how ANet’s inner workings are, he had put up employee reviews of the company before, but has since taken them down as some people were using them to drag the thread off topic.

Very true, and well said! Great post.

Arenanet should not be adding new content or changing things nobody wants, creating new problems, until all of the problems that are already present are fixed.
My No 1 wish would be to make ALL the traits useful. And things like the pet mechanic apparently need an overhaul, but they’re working on it with the CDI, I presume…

Alos, first person mode pl0x!

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Finally, when regarding how ANet’s inner workings are, he had put up employee reviews of the company before, but has since taken them down as some people were using them to drag the thread off topic.

Actually he put up anonymously posted reviews by a site that is in a federal lawsuit after evidence that this site was posting such reviews by individuals that never actually had any association or affiliation with the companies, upon receiving compensation from the competitors of the businesses in which such reviews as the ones he linked were received. In other words, the site he linked to is in the hot seat for literally making up such reviews for money, and you are using this as the bases to your argument to support the OP claiming to know how Anet works? Your kidding right?

Dragonic Elemental.2674:

Arenanet should not be adding new content or changing things nobody wants,

And how are you determining no one wants this? Literally hundreds of thousands of players are logging in to do living story, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of threads praising it. Just because you “feel” it isn’t popular, doesn’t make it so. They have tons of reasonable evidence to presume otherwise.

coglin.1867:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Finally, when regarding how ANet’s inner workings are, he had put up employee reviews of the company before, but has since taken them down as some people were using them to drag the thread off topic.

Actually he put up anonymously posted reviews by a site that is in a federal lawsuit after evidence that this site was posting such reviews by individuals that never actually had any association or affiliation with the companies, upon receiving compensation from the competitors of the businesses in which such reviews as the ones he linked were received. In other words, the site he linked to is in the hot seat for literally making up such reviews for money, and you are using this as the bases to your argument to support the OP claiming to know how Anet works? Your kidding right?

Dragonic Elemental.2674:

Arenanet should not be adding new content or changing things nobody wants,

And how are you determining no one wants this? Literally hundreds of thousands of players are logging in to do living story, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of threads praising it. Just because you “feel” it isn’t popular, doesn’t make it so. They have tons of reasonable evidence to presume otherwise.

Nobody wants the balance changes introduced in recent patches and when the forums are full of people dissuading ANet of making them and they still go through with it, well that shows how little they listen to us.

The point of the thread is that ANet needs to speed up their balance iterations instead of maintaining this glacial speed with sweeping changes all at once. If you feel that this approach to balance is working, that’s just you being wrong. It leads to stagnant meta, broken builds running amok for months, dozens of useless traits and skills since release and a slew of underwhelming profession mechanics compounded by a profound sense of neglect by the players.

If the issue is not in management than the only other explanation would be a balance team that is both incompetent as well as full of hubris, MonMalthias just chose to believe the more plausible and less terrible option.

Excellent post. I wish only that the community’s decidedly ardent view of the state of the game would sufficiently motivate the management to listen.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Nobody wants the balance changes introduced in recent patches and when the forums are full of people dissuading ANet of making them and they still go through with it, well that shows how little they listen to us.

And comments such as this make my point precisely. Your making a claim based on your skewed, personal opinion, yet claiming it as if it is a fact.Yet a large portion of the changed were screamed and pleaded for on the individual professions sub forums, while you inaccurately claim no one wanted any of them. The fact that you even begin to believe you speak for the community is comical in itself.

coglin.1867:

Kiriakulos.1690:

Nobody wants the balance changes introduced in recent patches and when the forums are full of people dissuading ANet of making them and they still go through with it, well that shows how little they listen to us.

And comments such as this make my point precisely. Your making a claim based on your skewed, personal opinion, yet claiming it as if it is a fact.Yet a large portion of the changed were screamed and pleaded for on the individual professions sub forums, while you inaccurately claim no one wanted any of them. The fact that you even begin to believe you speak for the community is comical in itself.

Your willingness to ignore page after page of disgruntlement and evidence showing that people are frustrated these forums speaks volumes about your commitment to ignorance.

I’ve read many more pages of people complaining about balance changes rather than extolling what was actually implemented, case in point Necromancers asked for survivability tools since release and instead got 2 new damaging conditions, skewing the conditionmancer build from workable into OP. Instead of addressing the main cause of this, namely Dhuumfire, ANet have nerfed and shaved condition application and utility from multiple points which have never generated a whisper of complaint. Now finally, almost 7 months later, Dhuumfire is being changed into a skill based application, will any of the other nerfs be reverted? I find that incredibly doubtful.

I will not continue to argue with you here so as not to give a moderator an excuse for closing this thread due to veering off-topic and devolving into personal attacks, which judging by the content you employ in your posts seems to be somewhat your objective. Did the OP somehow hit “close to home” with his critiques? Do you have a personal stake in keeping the balance patches as they are right now?

coglin.1867:

As much as i want to agree with a fair portion of what your saying MonMalthias, the fact is, you make a lot of "statements’ that you either have no evidence what so ever to support, or are blind conjecture, or just your personal opinion. The problem is, you state them as if they are fact, then go on to continue working off of opinion and conjecture as the building blocks for your statements.

You make statement after statement after statement claiming this issue or that problem with Anets management, or balance team, or testers. MonMalthias, I have to ask, what do you do for a living, and where did you go to school? I ask, because to make as many claims as you have, and to word it as you do, to suggest you have some reason to have more insight then the rest of us, should at least come with come credentials.

I challenge you to prove your claims and exclamations. You make claims slandering management, you make statements about their processes for fixing bugs and balancing (while I doubt you have any more insight then anyone else on this and your statements are 100% assumption and conjecture), and frankly, a good portion of your wording is misleading and you make a lot of accusations as well as many disparaging comments in an effort to come across as is you have proof, facts, or special insight, when you absolutely do not.

I am all for expressing an opinion on the game, its direction, and what you feel about it. As well I am all for having discussions based on those opinions. But once you begin to pretend you have a clue about individuals, their jobs, how their processes work, how their structure actually functions, then make negative remarks and disparaging remarks, all i feel you are doing, is using the forums to promote the equivalent of your own personal blog. No where in your original post’s do I see you seeking other feed back or take steps to open discussions, you simply have 3 full post to open up this thread, all full of personal opinion, accusations, conjecture, and negative claims, with no real facts to support it, then continue your discussions under the pretense that all of your conjecture is actually true.

This lecturing, personal blog of yours, has no business here. You don’t appear to discuss any actually balancing discussions. Not to say that your opinion doesn’t have value or that this post doesn’t belong on the forums, I am more specifically referring to it being in the balance subforums. Your OP has inspired literally zero honest balance discussions, and should be placed somewhere more appropriate.

You make valid arguments, and I agree with some points on your stance. I had elected to avoid putting inline citations in Vancouver form originally in order to cut down on character limit as my OP was already far in excess out of the 5k chars. I had hoped that putting a few of the threads on the PVP forums as inline links would be sufficient. Your post has demonstrated to me that it clearly is not. Therefore I will, over the next few posts, attempt to correct my error. I will not edit my OP accordingly, however. They are already at or as close to 5k and adding citations to those would necessitate more bothersome editing.

As a more broad commentary on the direction of Arenanet’s balance and priorities, it would be necessarily vague, and I apologise for not going more in depth with the issues I brought up as this would have required that I mine several months of threads and posts for each individual issue – which would have cluttered my OP to an unacceptable level (to me).

As for the Glass Door reviews site coming under a lawsuit, I was not aware of that. In light of this, this would strengthen my decision to delete and withdraw those posts – which I have done and I will make no further reference to the management of Arenanet from this point forward.

This thread needs to stay at the top of the first page until it gets significant red posts.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to read the full OP, but from what I read I absolutely agree. This game needs smaller, more frequent balancing updates in lieu of larger, more sporadic ones. With the current setup, too many different elements are added simultaneously, which leads to some changes more adversely affecting the game than others. When you tweak 50 different skills and traits, and 20 of them end up having unintended side effects, they are often left lingering for months while players have no choice but to deal with imbalanced and bugged mechanics because Anet doesn’t want to bother fixing them until the next big balancing update months later.

I can’t stress enough how much balancing and playability needs to be prioritized over extra content. People don’t care about how much there is to do in a game if they can’t have fun while doing it, and a game running rampant with balance issues and bugs is not fun for anyone.

Phenn.5167:

This thread needs to stay at the top of the first page until it gets significant red posts.

This is exactly what I was thinking. We cannot let this die until it is adequately responded to.

Phenn.5167:

This thread needs to stay at the top of the first page until it gets significant red posts.

So it needs to stay here until the end of the world? Well, good luck :P