Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems plaguing sPvP in this game is the feeling of stagnation caused by month-long delays between balance passes combined with ANet’s balancing philosophy of making small, incremental changes each pass.

Most successful eSport games have balance passes that are for the most part small, but always frequent. GW2 only has half of the equation for their balancing process, because for some reason, ANet has decided to tie the timing of balances passes to the timing of their major feature/content releases. And this, I believe, is the root cause of most of the frustration in the sPvP playerbase.

The first step to addressing this would be to completely disassociate balance timing and feature/content delivery timing. Features and content require rigorous internal testing to iron out potential game breaking bugs, which makes them time consuming by nature. Balance, however, (at least the subtle approach to balance that ANet is striving for) is heavily dependent on agility, the rate at which your team can repeat the cycle of evaluating customer feedback and the current balance state, introducing meaningful changes, polishing away issues, and reiterating into the next release.

It would be risky to jump into a new process right away for with a still relatively inexperienced team. So I recommend setting up public test servers to experiment with a more agile balancing process (weekly/bi-weekly maximum), that would allow players to try out changes in the pipeline, give early input, and discover issues that simply cannot be detected in controlled QA environments. This should be a similar infrastructure to what ANet’s internal QA team operates on, but on a much larger scale.

Having these servers could vastly improve the quality of the balance changes in the monthly releases (until you make the full transition), eliminate much of the stagnation problem for players who choose to partake in these servers (which I imagine will be a fairly significant portion of the sPvP player base), and provide a chance for ANet to improve transparency when it comes to making balance decisions.

Eventually, as ANet becomes more used to the weekly balance passes, they should transition into a more agile balance process for the main servers as well. The experience gained from the test servers should help ease the transition.

Any thoughts?

My thoughts?

Balance is fine. Infrastructure is still broken.

Balance is fine lol. Before shaking stagnation, you need level playing field which does not exist fully. mostly sure but still classes at both outliers.

Yes, absolutely. You are right on all points, bravo. I’ve said things along those lines many times. They just won’t do it for some unknown reason. Their current approach to testing, pushing on balance changes and communicating has left even normally rather calm and patient individuals like myself endlessly frustrated. I don’t know why they would set out to frustrate the player base when there are other options.

I’m still having fun... is something wrong with me?

WyldKat.4712:

I’m still having fun… is something wrong with me?

With the game so am I, for the most part, or I wouldn’t be playing the game. What I’m not having fun with, and don’t think any players are, is with the lack of patch notes, a public test realm or how slow balance changes are rolling out when the game is still at this point saturated with balance problems, UP and OP abilities/traits that need tweaking, etc.

WyldKat.4712:

I’m still having fun… is something wrong with me?

Nope, I have a lot of fun playing the game too. =)

But I do believe it would become more fun, and is healthier for the game as it progresses into an eSport, if ANet balances on a shorter iteration than monthly.

Bumping this post I made 6 months ago because sadly it’s even more relevant now than when I posted it…

We need more agile balance passes to quickly bring the meta into a playable baseline state. This last balance pass changed practically nothing. And from the looks of it you’ll be waiting another month at minimum before making any further balance changes.

This combination of small incremental changes and long waits in between balance passes is what’s killing player enthusiasm for sPvP right now.

Instead of pushing a handful of small changes and then doing absolutely nothing for months waiting for the meta to develop, learn to be more adaptive and reactive in your development process. Consistently observe player feedback and continuously push small incremental changes to improve lackluster builds and playstyles, and always be ready to do SOMETHING (again, small incremental changes) to shave down builds that becomes out of line within a short timeframe of its dominance. Be sure to always prioritize the latter to avoid power creep, i.e. stop waiting for other overpowered builds to emerge to match the previously overpowered builds and using these types of builds as your standard measure for viability.

Do this in a public test server if you’re not confident with rolling things out at a faster pace in the main servers. I’m sure plenty of sPvPers such as myself will be happy to be your guinea pigs when given the choice.

What we need:
-people that actually understand the game.

What we don’t need:
-People that suggest adding torment, tainted shackles, spectral wall and dumbfire to necro in a single patch.
-People that dont understand that s/d thieves are a problem because of evades and their infinite teleports, not boon striping.
-People that suggest immobilize stacking in duration. Like seriously, in the dev stream the devs were like “yeah so these are the ele changes. Oh btw guys, immobilize now stacks in duration. Not a big deal”. The way they said it just shows how unaware of what their changes do their game. It just dumbed down the game even further, you don’t need to time anything anymore because it just stacks. All that bigger radius to skills and condition stacking does is dumb down an already dumb game.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

Balance is fine lol. Before shaking stagnation, you need level playing field which does not exist fully. mostly sure but still classes at both outliers.

The way I see it, they let loose a giant ugly boulder ever since “that one patch” and it’s been going down hill full speed, while you try to stop it slowly with speed bumps, you should probably just hit it with an equally big balance patch to counter-balance it.

I agree with the overall sentiment that there are several Apex Predator builds right now that are completely overshadowing all others for each possible role in sPvP.

ANet seems to be waiting for people to discover other builds that can match or beat those builds in their quest to improve build variety, when they should really be doing the opposite and tone down the Apex Predator builds. Otherwise the game will continue to suffer from slow power creeps that will eventually bring sPvP to its knees.