Guild Wars 2

The original post got moved out of the pvp forum so heres a repost.
Keep this alive and share.
http://www.twitch.tv/helsethgw2/c/2779775

This bloke is spot on aye.

sigh

ANet, to my understanding you guys seem to have some rivalry with Helseth. But please, listen to this man. He understands how Guild Wars 2 could become the MMO e-sports you planned it to be

in fact, the players that are reading, that are posting here, all have the potential to help you. I just hope you guys would help us

Helseth threatened to kill people AFAIK..
These types of people should not be given an open forum.
But whatever Helseth2013

Also his rants are over-rated and boring to listen to….
He makes a good point once in a while..
but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
(Most of the time it’s something that’s been posted 1,000,000 times on the forums already though like Asura animations)

Dude, I have been saying the same thing from the very beginning. Anet has their priorities kitten backwards. They focus on the 1 percent esport crowd and expect the playerbase to follow, instead of focusing on the 99 percent and allowing esport to naturally foster itself.

If the playerbase wants more game modes, give them more game modes. They do not have to be a part of esports. Make the game fun and more people will play. With more people comes a stronger community, and consequently and stonger esport community.

I support Helseth’s ideas, it’s better than the ‘’wait after PAX to actually start fixing this non sense meta’‘. A lot of people who wants something similar to competitive pvp just quitted when skyhammer happened, it just reflexes what Anet think pvp is going to be. The problem is the game isn’t competitive, neither fun, unless you like wvw roaming which pvp is even more casual than hotjoin’s.
The idea of delaying a balance patch because PAX is either bad or lazy. Games that are able to completely forget their actual balance, have a backup server to do tourneys, which isn’t the case here.
You just can’t ignore 99,9% of people not playing PAX, hell I don’t want to watch that npc/spam fest even when I want to support the game I bought..

This needs to be seen more because he gets it.

Just playing and watching the rise of LoL since it’s release it’s easy to see how an esport game comes to fruition.

Regardless of his often ridiculous persona, Helseth is a pretty solid soundingboard for how to community feels.

If you are in this for the competition (Esports) don’t bother, unless you are one of the teams going to PAX right now.
Leaderboards are seriously flawed, I ranked solo queue top 100 on the first day and I am still ranked above most of the committed pvpers on my friendlist simply because I got up there first.

If you are looking to have fun, you better have 4 equally skilled friends to queue with otherwise there is nothing for you here. Hotjoin is frustrating and you are not even guaranteed to play on the same team.

I agree, it is a very poor idea to forego balance in favour of a prize tournament no one really cares to watch because balance is horrible.

No one will bother going through my post history, but I (among many players on the forums) called out a large number of the issues we are stuck with now before the release of key updates: leavers in tournaments, AI builds, abuse on the leaderboards, promotion for the game, …
I am glad a lot of players take initiative: http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2pvptv, but in all honesty I feel Arenanet is not doing enough to make SPvP fun, competitive or esport worthy. I’m sorry.

Knote.2904:

This needs to be seen more because he gets it.

Just playing and watching the rise of LoL since it’s release it’s easy to see how an esport game comes to fruition.

Copy one of the most popular game mods in Korea and award prizemoney?

Blackmoa.3186:

The original post got moved out of the pvp forum so heres a repost.
Keep this alive and share.
http://www.twitch.tv/helsethgw2/c/2779775

Pls tell Helseth that although i agree and support every word he said in the 3 rants i saw, Anet does not deserve the effort he is putting in making these videos…

Btw if he can’t post on these forums himself tells alot about how much devs give a kitten about what we players say.

In fact if you read a post from them or watch a video they ALWAYS say “how we want” “how we feel” “what we are aiming for” THEM, always THEM never the players.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

That aside, I have some questions, and would like to address some other points made.

1. What exactly do you mean by allocating resources to eSports?
2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

Some more points:
1. The current meta is not controlled by the PvP team. Yes, we monitor it closely as balance greatly affects PvP. However, no resources are being taken away from PvP development in order to do balance. So I’d like to just squash that misconception now.

2. Skill effect clutter – another thing not controlled by the PvP team. Another thing that we monitor and provide feedback to the teams that do control it.

3. Sending out in-game mail is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that every message that is sent has to be edited and localized.

• This is, however, something we recognize as an area to be improved. We are investigating ways to provide in-game messaging for events.

4. Lastly, I want to thank you for promoting the guildwars2pvptv channel. I always see a few people on the team with the stream always going on their 2nd/3rd monitors. Once PAX has past, we’ll be looking to better promote streamers from all areas of the game. So keep it up!!

In allocating resources to Esports, I think he means the fairly large focus on the PAX tournament (although he might have slightly exaggerated it).

As for fun, I think he just means balance, and, if you saw his post from last week about spam, and the post that was on the same line of thought that I put up recently about skills being used more tactically and strategically than they currently are.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

That aside, I have some questions, and would like to address some other points made.

1. What exactly do you mean by allocating resources to eSports?
2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

Some more points:
1. The current meta is not controlled by the PvP team. Yes, we monitor it closely as balance greatly affects PvP. However, no resources are being taken away from PvP development in order to do balance. So I’d like to just squash that misconception now.

2. Skill effect clutter – another thing not controlled by the PvP team. Another thing that we monitor and provide feedback to the teams that do control it.

3. Sending out in-game mail is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that every message that is sent has to be edited and localized.

• This is, however, something we recognize as an area to be improved. We are investigating ways to provide in-game messaging for events.

4. Lastly, I want to thank you for promoting the guildwars2pvptv channel. I always see a few people on the team with the stream always going on their 2nd/3rd monitors. Once PAX has past, we’ll be looking to better promote streamers from all areas of the game. So keep it up!!

ok so basically everything that is wrong with the game is not your fault. There is nothing at all under “control” you simply “monitor” thats cute!

I guess it is ours then! this meta is the worse EVER and i believe we all agree on that but it is ofc the players fault for playing the extremely OP professions that YOU made.

He means fun as in game formats that are fun to people.

Conquest does not encourage fun for many people because rather than combat it emphasizes certain build elements, like builds who can bunker and outlast, and the extreme builds that can debunker. Most importantly, you can win most team matches and still lose the game because conquest is about rotating players and neutralizing/capping nodes.

Other formats like capture the flag or death match emphasize other aspects of combat that tend to be fun for most people. Death match in particular.

Conquest also creates a lot of 1v1 scenarios, and this game is horribly balanced on 1v1. There’s no way a necro or ranger will kill a warrior. There’s no way a mesmer will 1v1 a competent thief. There’s no way an elementalist can win against a warrior or s/d thief or necro.

In death match classes which are not good in 1v1 don’t get penalized.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

That aside, I have some questions, and would like to address some other points made.

1. What exactly do you mean by allocating resources to eSports?
2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

Some more points:
1. The current meta is not controlled by the PvP team. Yes, we monitor it closely as balance greatly affects PvP. However, no resources are being taken away from PvP development in order to do balance. So I’d like to just squash that misconception now.

2. Skill effect clutter – another thing not controlled by the PvP team. Another thing that we monitor and provide feedback to the teams that do control it.

3. Sending out in-game mail is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that every message that is sent has to be edited and localized.

• This is, however, something we recognize as an area to be improved. We are investigating ways to provide in-game messaging for events.

4. Lastly, I want to thank you for promoting the guildwars2pvptv channel. I always see a few people on the team with the stream always going on their 2nd/3rd monitors. Once PAX has past, we’ll be looking to better promote streamers from all areas of the game. So keep it up!!

Fun in giving more modes, better rewards. Fun in better meta
i think most people agree that only one mode is not fun, rewards are not that great, specially for tournaments, and that this current AoE condi spam, minion meta is not fun either.

as in clutter personally i think warriors skill effect are great. because they don’t really clutter the screen with all of the kittenness flashy effects and they are not bad looking either

Allie Murdock.8152:

This is the excessive hyperbole that I mentioned in my post. You have every right to complain, but we can’t really understand your problem unless you actually provide some constructive feedback.

Well, I know that the majority of the sPvP community has been pretty much keeping spirit rangers and necros in their sights for a while now (although you guys probably already know that), with some secondary targets including thief S/D (one that I don’t agree with, because I know how much skill the build requires and how it can be countered, but w/e), stun lock warriors (too gimmicky for me to think it’s that good), and even just condis in general (not really, but necros and rangers are dealing a lot of condi damage right now).

On the other hand, a lot of us feel that eles are extremely underpowered right now, as well as mesmer but to a much lesser extent.

Get into the game and play it, talk with ppl in the Mists (if you can find anyone there) there are dozens of threads in this subforum with detailed feedback, videos, screenshots, practical examples and some suggestions too.

I don’t understand why you keep asking for constructive feedback have you read it all already? if so, i’m sure you won’t need any more…

EDIT: I agree that balancing takes time but what about tweaking a hand full of abilities that are braking the game atm?! how long does it take to make a temporary adjustment to those 5-6 abilities so that it is less frustrating to wait for an actual patch to fix it?!

Allie Murdock.8152:

Arganthium.5638:

In allocating resources to Esports, I think he means the fairly large focus on the PAX tournament (although he might have slightly exaggerated it).

As for fun, I think he just means balance, and, if you saw his post from last week about spam, and the post that was on the same line of thought that I put up recently about skills being used more tactically and strategically than they currently are.

Sure, except the PAX event is being mostly managed by our events, marketing and community teams. No resources are being taken away from development for PAX.

As for fun, we understand that balance isn’t in it’s ideal place. This is why we have a balance team that focuses completely on balance. Time is needed to balance, it can’t be done at the snap of a finger.

i’ve heard that PvP balance team are not balancing anything because PAX is going on and the patch after PAX is over is not big balance patch either only the one after is a big balance is patch true.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, now which is it? I have 3 different people saying that fun means 3 different things. This is what I meant when I said fun is subjective.

To some people, it’s fun to knock people off the edge of skyhammer. To others, it’s fun to be matched up against equally skilled players. To even more, it’s fun to feel like you’re great at the class you play.

That’s why the guy in the video said that you need to provide players more things for it to be fun, like better rewards, better meta, since fun is subjective. i’m sure everyone agree that only one mode is not going to be fun, since fun is subjective as you said.

its like saying some people like apple, some others like banana, and others like other fruits so im going to sell watermelon juice only in my juice store.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Volrath.1473:

Get into the game and play it, talk with ppl in the Mists (if you can find anyone there) there are dozens of threads in this subforum with detailed feedback, videos, screenshots, practical examples and some suggestions too.

I don’t understand why you keep asking for constructive feedback have you read it all already? if so, i’m sure you won’t need any more…

So, I shouldn’t promote constructive feedback because of why?

Do you want us to actually fix the problems you are having, or do you want us to just wing-it without knowing what the actual problem is?

It’s completely your choice to use hyperbole and not be constructive, but don’t expect us to read your mind or understand how to fix the issue if you don’t give us any detailed information regarding it.

Yes, there is constructive feedback. However, if we get 1 constructive post out of 10, how do we know that it’s a real issue if those 9 posts don’t actually give us any information?

But you can gather data on what forms of fun are mostly shared by the playerbase instead of pretending like it’s some huge task because it’s “relative”. And make changes based on that feedback.

And there’s no denying that a large amount of feedback has constantly coalesced in favor of other format types, and most especially balancing the classes and introducing build diversity.

Build diversity is something that hasn’t even happened to classes like the elementalist or mesmer. It’s always been shatters and it’s always been water+ arcana. For rangers it has always been conditions because their power coefficients suck.

And in one year of those issues existing they have not been addressed meaningfully.

Shortly after release Jon Peters asked in the mesmer forums for ideas about Cry of Frustration since they didn’t know what to do with it. Well, guess what, one year later and all that feedback went to the toilet because Cry of Frustration has remained the same as it was in closed beta.

I agree on his point that sPvP needs to appeal more to the majority of GW2 players…the 99%, if the majority find sPvP fantastic fun then a esports will evolve naturally from sPvP and Anet will find it easy to promote…

Atm…all the chat I hear from other players is Anet trying to ‘force’ esports on us and a lot of players just don’t like sPvP enough to get involved at that level.

Anet should concentrate on making PvP a lot of fun and building up the GW2 playerbase who play it.

I enjoy messing about with different builds in sPvP but you eventually realise there’s only perhaps 1 or 2 builds for each class that are viable…you don’t have enough diversity or enough interesting skills/traits and you are too restricted in what skills/traits you can choose. This results in boring/non-competitive play as well.

Allie, I’m sorry if I’m too passionate about this game but thats because i love it…
I’m going to bed now, I have to work early in the morning, also i dont wanna argue with you because i like you as well.

BUT (there is always a but…) what you are asking is for feedback to gain any credit we have to repeat ourselves countless times?

If one player make a valid point and other agree with it and comment on it is not enough?
If we create new threads about the same issue they get closed/merged.
Please explain, tell us how you want your feedback and we will give it to you.
Until now, we are clearly doing it wrong.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Volrath.1473:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

That aside, I have some questions, and would like to address some other points made.

1. What exactly do you mean by allocating resources to eSports?
2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

Some more points:
1. The current meta is not controlled by the PvP team. Yes, we monitor it closely as balance greatly affects PvP. However, no resources are being taken away from PvP development in order to do balance. So I’d like to just squash that misconception now.

2. Skill effect clutter – another thing not controlled by the PvP team. Another thing that we monitor and provide feedback to the teams that do control it.

3. Sending out in-game mail is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that every message that is sent has to be edited and localized.

• This is, however, something we recognize as an area to be improved. We are investigating ways to provide in-game messaging for events.

4. Lastly, I want to thank you for promoting the guildwars2pvptv channel. I always see a few people on the team with the stream always going on their 2nd/3rd monitors. Once PAX has past, we’ll be looking to better promote streamers from all areas of the game. So keep it up!!

ok so basically everything that is wrong with the game is not your fault. There is nothing at all under “control” you simply “monitor” thats cute!

I guess it is ours then! this meta is the worse EVER and i believe we all agree on that but it is ofc the players fault for playing the extremely OP professions that YOU made.

This is the excessive hyperbole that I mentioned in my post. You have every right to complain, but we can’t really understand your problem unless you actually provide some constructive feedback.

Or, sometimes you are told exact examples and you reply with “Sounds….random”.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Lighter.5631:

i’ve heard that PvP balance team are not balancing anything because PAX is going on and the patch after PAX is over is not big balance patch either only the one after is a big balance is patch true.

There is no “PvP balance team” – there is only the balance team.

Yes, they are not going to make sweeping changes to balance before PAX. That is not completely because of PAX. Also, bigger patches don’t always equal better.

That’s not to say that certain things should or shouldn’t be adjusted, btw.

Thanks for the reply, i guess theres only one balance team and theres PvE team and PvP team who monitor the game and give feedback to The balance team.

ill make sure when people complain, ill tell them tha its the balance team to blame not the pvp team, lol.

as of big patch, personally i just want to get ride of this current stat of pvp asap, so i can play this game again..

You guys are getting trolled so hard by Allie :O Lol

Allie Murdock.8152:

Arganthium.5638:

In allocating resources to Esports, I think he means the fairly large focus on the PAX tournament (although he might have slightly exaggerated it).

As for fun, I think he just means balance, and, if you saw his post from last week about spam, and the post that was on the same line of thought that I put up recently about skills being used more tactically and strategically than they currently are.

Sure, except the PAX event is being mostly managed by our events, marketing and community teams. No resources are being taken away from development for PAX.

As for fun, we understand that balance isn’t in it’s ideal place. This is why we have a balance team that focuses completely on balance. Time is needed to balance, it can’t be done at the snap of a finger.

Balance takes time. Fine. But when you then release patches that have stupid unfun mechanics (fear/spirits/immunities/stuns/evasion) buffed to the sky then people hate the meta. If you werent aware that this meta would develop then you have bad testers. Most top players knew after 30 minutes with the dhuumfire patch that necro, spirirt ranger and sword thief were going to be a huge problem.

A good system would be to actually understand the implications of balance before you do it by having a good team procedure.

Your balance team is:

1, Always behind the curve in a way in which other developers of other games are not.
2, Then too slow to respond to issues when they arise.

And you are talking down to players saying “You dont understand how it works” or things to that effect. To alot of us this isnt just a game. It is a community. It is like a football team you support. You cant change supporting it because you are tied into it. We are tied into this game by time investment and by the relationships we have established whilst playing the game. So you might think we are an unproductive ignorant bunch of whiners and sensationalists. But we aren’t. We are just people who are tied into something which is sinking fast. GW2

Allie Murdock.8152:

Lighter.5631:

i’ve heard that PvP balance team are not balancing anything because PAX is going on and the patch after PAX is over is not big balance patch either only the one after is a big balance is patch true.

There is no “PvP balance team” – there is only the balance team.

Yes, they are not going to make sweeping changes to balance before PAX. That is not completely because of PAX. Also, bigger patches don’t always equal better.

That’s not to say that certain things should or shouldn’t be adjusted, btw.

Allie,

First and foremost, thank you for being active in this thread in spite of some posters responding in an ambiguous or disrespectful manner.

From what I’ve read, it appears that the “PvP Team” is limited in their capacity to exact balance changes catered specifically to PvP. Viewing other games, (WoW comes to mind and certainly GW1), skills in PvP sometimes act differently in the PvP areas of the game than in the PvE areas. If ANET would allow the PvP team to balance PvP as it sees fit by adjusting skills in PvP differently from the PvE aspect of the game, balance might be more feasible.

Currently, rewards are few, grinds are long and game types are one. To be more specific on these points, you have certainly done a great job with allowing new skins to be used in PvP and without asking for PvP exclusive skins (too much dev time/resources), legendaries could be introduced into PvP.

The above might contradict my statements about long grinds as a legendary weapon in PvP shouldn’t be easy to acquire. The rank finishers are cool. Grinding ranks does take an absurd amount of time. To my knowledge, there are a handful of players who have been grinding many hours a day and are only approaching Rank 70. The rewards for that much effort is a finisher, that’s it. I suggest not only adding additional rewards (discussed below), but lowering the grind. If people want to show their “skill” they can do that with the ideas below. The real reason to lower the grind, is to give players a sense of advancement in PvP. There just really isn’t any. It takes weeks and weeks to get a new finisher AND that’s all you get really, as access to new gear is…lackluster. Perhaps titles specific to the leaderboard are in order? Maybe “glowy” effects on characters as they rank up that carry over into PvE and WvW? Something that sparks people’s interest when they view someone who PvP’s a lot. The beauty of cosmetic things, as you know, is that they don’t help characters be more powerful or effect balance, but they can certainly be a great way to advertise other areas of your game.

PvP in this game, needs some fresh blood. Please stop pushing the current game type. Please. Add new ones. Even if they don’t “work for e-sports.” It really will encourage more people to start getting into PvP. You need a wider player base for e-sports to ever become a reality. It’s that simple. Adding more game types will encourage players to come try them out. I’ll allow every other game that has a successful e-sports competition to solidify my argument here. They all have a large player base. As has been said, cap-the-flag and deathmatch are two wildly popular game types.

Rewards. Guild halls. What’s in them? Portals to a permanent custom server, a mystic forge, target dummies, a portal to Lion’s Arch, PvE crafting tables, etc. The whole nine yards. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you guys must tie the various aspects of this game together. Encouraging guilds to branch out and focus its resources on encouraging its members to try different game types can only mean profit for you. This can be done by making guild halls cost things only available in WvW and PvP and PvE. Guilds will recruit players who frequent these game types. These players will interact and encourage other guild members to try out areas of the game they were nervous about or disinterested in, becoming a mentor if you will. You get the point.

Lastly, as an aside. With guilds and the way they “build” upgrades/buffs for players. Build qeues MUST be separate for various aspects of the game. A WvW buff should not block a PvE buff. The same should be true for PvP and so on. This allows guilds to focus on more than one aspect of the game without being a detriment to another. Player’s should be encouraged to try all aspects of your game.

I hope I haven’t wasted your time Allie. Thanks for all you do.

Krayiss26:

You guys are getting trolled so hard by Allie :O Lol

Thought I was the only one thinking this as I went down.

There should be an additional format, and a look at improving the conquest class balance and map improvements.

Allie Murdock.8152:

For sure, I can’t say we’re entirely happy with the meta right now either. Changes are coming.

Haters gonna hate and all that.. Best of luck addressing some of the useful feedback here though.

There’s still people who’ve played enough mmos to know you guys are doing a good job, keep it up.

Allie Murdock.8152:

There is no “PvP balance team” – there is only the balance team.

Why?

Why isn’t there a team for PvE a team for PvP and a team for WvW?
They are three very different game modes that function in radically different ways and skills and traits should reflect this?

I really hope the answer isn’t something like “It’s too much work” or “We don’t want to confuse casual players that can’t be bothered to read tootlips”

Allie Murdock.8152:

Lighter.5631:

as of big patch, personally i just want to get ride of this current stat of pvp asap, so i can play this game again..

For sure, I can’t say we’re entirely happy with the meta right now either. Changes are coming.

I just want to know generally more about how the balancing process is done.
Like when you released necro with dhuumfire at 4 sec did you test in 1vs1 up to 5vs5 scenarios with the current meta builds?Then with new builds that came up after the patch?
And how come it didnt occur for example how rough time eles and mesm would have against these types of builds?I mean taking half the base hp with an autoattack on an unavoidable proc seems rather weird just by hearing it,doesnt it?
Or did you have in mind specific counter builds on specific classes while releasing these changes as a form of balance?
Also since now creating builds in this game wasnt any difficult procedure in terms of choices.We basically play what you put there..Theres always a better choise with very little diverisity so i cant agree that you need time (moths? :O ) for the meta to develop.You should already know how things will flow before hand,your testers should have stumble upon the current meta way before us did!

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

So basicly, if you state a opinion about something through media that you guys don’t think is constructive, you can expect that post being moved to linkville?

The treatment of this situation seems a little unique. I mean, there’s a post on the first page containing a link to a 9-minute video of solo-Q warrior gameplay, and countless other ones. All seemingly staying where they are.

No qualm or rivalry my kitten .

By the way, is not the forums a place for the actual players in the first place, actually stating their opinion and creating constructive discussions in that way?

When players are speaking about fundamental flaws of the game in order to rise awareness of it, removing those posts that are actually way above the avarage one is not the way to go. But, removing it, combined with the lack of change regarding theese flaws themselfs kind of makes it look like you’re either closing your eyes to the problem, or, that you actually have some kind of qualm or rivalry with the player in question.

It makes you look bad.

Just a tad upset, but censorship could be a big deal.

I only started PvP recently, with a Guardian. This went well until the past patch or two (wasn’t paying enough attention, sorry) and now I can’t seem to stay alive against a ranger or Necro.

I switched to a Necro and after a couple of Ames getting the hang of it, I was doing well again.. With all the minions I could get my hands on and no research on builds.

There is only one area which I feel really hurts my experience:

targeting.

I use the call target to keep an eye on who I am fighting, but any player who can cloak is un targeted when they reappear. Toons who don’t have this ability remain targeted, even after they die and respawn. (Targeting also help me avoid constantly getting retargeted to minions and pets)

To me, that’s a huge issue, especially when trying to find my mouse cursor (making it turn red doesn’t they’ll any!) while using right mouse to turn my character.

I don’t know how other players control their toons, but using mouse with rt-click to strafe and turn can be a painful experience.

Help! I want to be a PvP guru, but not like this…

@Avead your missing a few things

Allie Murdock.8152:

What I’m trying to do is help you guys to understand how things work here, and why things are done the way they are done, and how you can help if you really want to.

Please tell us how the things work there in the balance team. !!! ?
June 25 necromancers received 2 new conditions; Dhuumfire + Torment + a load of other things, OP spectral wall, spectral armors in DS what a great idea!
Also if you know or not how they thought this was a good idea or be honest and tell us whether or not it was tested.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Time is needed to balance, it can’t be done at the snap of a finger.

Give us some examples of the time frame needed to balance something like this? because its been months. /winky face

If I can be “selfish” …I hope you’re concerned with more than PvP rewards.

The Rewards are abysmal but carrot-sticking players to play PvP isn’t exactly….right?
To me PvP Rewards are a quality of life thing, you make them better because it’s an overall improvement of the game but it’s not gameplay. It’s quality of life that PvP should give me exp so I can jump into WvW more easily as an alternative game mode instead of feeling discouraged if I want to do it on anything other than my Thief since I didn’t feel compelled to go through PvE more than once.
It’s a pain that nothing in PvP outside of hoping for some dyes can be traded into PvE for some sort of coin revenue so if I want to gear another character I can do it without jumping on an event with 90 other people pressing 1 all day like a Ranger at some npc I can’t even see attack through particle effects and sheer people.

However it’s more than a pain that there isn’t another Gearless, levelless game mode that isn’t an Activity (so we still have our profession skills). When I burned out I popped into Smite and it’s a lot easier to stay in there because when I burned out of their main game mode due to some balance things they had done at the time…They had another mode I didn’t mind to jump into and wait things out. I’d think player retention is a good thing. You guys should get another mode in here, and throw some quick teleport NPC’s in the mists to the Activities (keg brawl and such) like you used to have in GW1 for the holiday events at the Great Temple of Balthazar.
The Mist should be a gathering of all things PvP, the consolidation of the pvp browser into the pvp window was great because it makes things more ergonomic but you could throw activities into the Mist (or teleports to them) for the same reason. If you’re worried about players bypassing way points you can use Glory as a teleport currency (broaden its purpose).

It’s more than a pain that classes fall in and out of favor the way they do but it’s also a lesser spoken of issue when weapon sets fall in and out of use (or some cases never came in). It was extremely agitating to say the least when S/D on a thief was nerfed back in Dec and then the set was left in that position all the way until April. That was a different play style you just removed from the game at the time, not cool at all. What were you going to tell them to play? D/P, D/D? Didn’t play the same, what if they didn’t like it than the answer was to kitten off? Of course not, you guys got to get that unlock, don’t nerf things off the face of the planet and leave it like that for months, it’s straight up ridiculous and the real reason people get worried about nerfs. What they enjoy may not just be toned down it might get nuked out of orbit for an extensive period of time. No reason to Smiters Boon anything in GW2. Yes OP stuff has to be nerfed, but if you’re looking at your statistics and see “How come we never see this?” then you’ve got to make some steps. From Launch to this date Elementalist conjures outside of Firey Great Sword have been underrepresented why is that? The Focus and staff? underrepresented, why? Thief Pistol/Pistol? Outside of a Jon Peters comment in December that it was underperforming and a body shot change I don’t know if it even exists in the dev client.

Work on having something extra to retain players if they don’t feel Conquest at the time, some diversity improvements. So many terrible Sigils and your team has acknowledged it, but we’re still waiting for even some changes. If there is still a slow and steady belief (maybe that changed) there should’ve been one or two changes to a couple sigils to bring them up by now.

GW2 isn’t terrible at all, it’s just frustrating (and it shouldn’t be which is why I take breaks) when it feels like things are barely happening. Balance does come and remedies issues but then another hole opens up or things get nuked out of orbit. Ends up feeling like for every patch we take A quarter of a step forward and I was hoping for a full step.

For an MMO game GW2 is one of the best balanced, hundreds of MMO’s have come and gone and do not hold a candle to GW2 in that department. However as a PvP game where it’s genre is ignored, GW2 can aim a lot higher than passing the low standards that MMO games have of their pvp.

Allie Murdock.8152:

2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

Indeed it is subjective! That is why some players would have more fun in duels and simple 3v3 matches! You have to realise that even if domination is the format that fits best for competitions*, it still isn’t the type of pvp that everyone wants to play. Personally I just can’t enjoy it, even if I try to.
Really, all games have game modes that not everyone likes, but to solve this problem, they come with multiple modes so that everyone can find something they like. For some reason however, Gw2 comes with only one game mode. :|

*not sure if this is the case, but even if it is.

Zenith.7301:

He means fun as in game formats that are fun to people.

Conquest does not encourage fun for many people because rather than combat it emphasizes certain build elements, like builds who can bunker and outlast, and the extreme builds that can debunker. Most importantly, you can win most team matches and still lose the game because conquest is about rotating players and neutralizing/capping nodes.

Other formats like capture the flag or death match emphasize other aspects of combat that tend to be fun for most people. Death match in particular.

Conquest also creates a lot of 1v1 scenarios, and this game is horribly balanced on 1v1. There’s no way a necro or ranger will kill a warrior. There’s no way a mesmer will 1v1 a competent thief. There’s no way an elementalist can win against a warrior or s/d thief or necro.

In death match classes which are not good in 1v1 don’t get penalized.

^^^ This!!! Absolutely this! GW1 felt like Build Wars towards the end, and this is beginning to feel like Build Wars v2.0

if the pvp team is not in charge of pvp balance then what do they do all day? i don’t mean that they are bad devs, but i remember a sotg a while back where they said they agreed that aoe was over the top. so now i imagine pvp devs wrote a little note and sent it to the balance team “pls nerf aoe, it’s a bit much. thnx” and the balance team replied “we don’t agree. regards, balance team”

where are the split skills? where are the split traits? where are the real gameplay changes that would make this game not a joke in the pvp world? in the lack of answers there are only people’s inferences. and my inference is that pvp is a sideshow development joke that takes a very far back seat to pve where aoe would understandably be a good thing. the game is spammy and skill takes second place to it. the feedback you are looking for has been on these forums all this time. your pvp dev team already know (I hope) why this game is bad and it’s painful to watch them squirm in sotg videos where they agree with player’s issues but are powerless to do anything about it.

the details of whatever is going on in anet are not my concern. you need to restructure and give your pvp devs the authority and resources to do what they need to do. then we can talk about the community’s feedback.

Allie Murdock.8152:

It’s completely your choice to use hyperbole and not be constructive, but don’t expect us to read your mind or understand how to fix the issue if you don’t give us any detailed information regarding it.
Yes, there is constructive feedback. However, if we get 1 constructive post out of 10, how do we know that it’s a real issue if those 9 posts don’t actually give us any information?

You posted a lot but you didn’t say anything worth it. Just random questions and bragging to the guys that try to help this game grow.

All gw2 players, as a community that spent time and money into the game, deserve an update on this sad state of the game we now have. You have had awesome constructive feedback since release and it’s not excuse that we now complain. Right now the game is boring. Some classes kill by spamming, others can’t do anything even if they do their best. This is unfair, repetitive, unbalanced, uninteresting, and boring. The game turned into a condition & dodge spamfest.

We deserve a balance patch asap, before or after the PAX tournament. But work on it and keep us updated, you should post the patch notes before the patch (liKe every other game) to have decent feedback. And we need a good balance patch, not like the last one (which broke the game, imo).

It’s sad that certaint classes like mesmer and ele are being ignored by top players who reroll to FOTM classes like ranger and necro. Players that have been playing ele/mesmer since BWE are switching to necro/thief. They do suck at these new classes, but they are getting better results. This hurts the game more than anything. I’d like to see real data about the classes being played in the top 200 leaderboards. I’m 100% sure it won’t be balanced at all.

tldr; less bragging in the forums and more work. Customers are always right and they have paid a lot of money and you didn’t deliver good content. Bad feedback is not a good excuse. You should be doing your work. Since your balance team is clueless, make a balance patch every week until you get it right. Anything is better than 2 months of broken meta.

I know my posts may infract some forum rules. But understand players have been ignored for too many days (literally no dev posts in the pvp forums) and we deserve some answers instead of random complains because “feedback is not good enough”

Feedback is not good enough.
Feedback is not good enough

Really?
Really??

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, now which is it? I have 3 different people saying that fun means 3 different things. This is what I meant when I said fun is subjective.

To some people, it’s fun to knock people off the edge of skyhammer. To others, it’s fun to be matched up against equally skilled players. To even more, it’s fun to feel like you’re great at the class you play.

Here you go what’s wrong with Skyhammer “fun” in SoloQ. I can’t stress enough how much this needs to be explained over an over again. Read that and pass that on to the map design balance team.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Skyhammer-is-an-original-and-fun-map-keep/first#post2669682

Allie Murdock.8152:

Firstly, we have no qualm or rivalry with Helseth.

That aside, I have some questions, and would like to address some other points made.

1. What exactly do you mean by allocating resources to eSports?
2. What exactly is your definition of fun? Fun is subjective, no?

While we definitely appreciate it when players are vocal and provide feedback, excessive hyperbole does not help us to understand the fundamental issue.

Some more points:
1. The current meta is not controlled by the PvP team. Yes, we monitor it closely as balance greatly affects PvP. However, no resources are being taken away from PvP development in order to do balance. So I’d like to just squash that misconception now.

2. Skill effect clutter – another thing not controlled by the PvP team. Another thing that we monitor and provide feedback to the teams that do control it.

3. Sending out in-game mail is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that every message that is sent has to be edited and localized.

• This is, however, something we recognize as an area to be improved. We are investigating ways to provide in-game messaging for events.

4. Lastly, I want to thank you for promoting the guildwars2pvptv channel. I always see a few people on the team with the stream always going on their 2nd/3rd monitors. Once PAX has past, we’ll be looking to better promote streamers from all areas of the game. So keep it up!!

Well to put it simply, the game should be fun, varied and somewhat balanced first, and should be focused on getting a casual playerbase interested in it, then give the tools to allow players to be competitive (soloqueue, team matches/tourny queue, rating etc) and it will just… happen automatically.

The casual playerbase is the life and backbone of esports. Right now with such a high focus on forcing a (part of the) game with a small following into esports is like taking a crippled child and pushing them relentlessly into become the #1 Pianist in the world w/o feeding him or letting him sleep.

There is a lot of things wrong with the game and so it’s kind of pointless to just sit there and “armchair developer” it up anyway, but basically priorities should be on fixing what’s wrong with the game and just making it enjoyable for the majority first. And from what I’ve read even the top players aren’t enjoying it atm lol.

TBH I was surprised to see Anet even managed to get a payed tournament, kudos on that however you made that happen, I just don’t see it working out in the long run though. Really cool of you to jump in this thread and communicate with everyone (not sarcasm =p).

Rambodacious.7495:

snip

+1