Guild Wars 2

It truly saddens me to have to post this. I’ve tried to be a staunch defender in the past – I understand how MMO’s work, how difficult development is, and how tight money can get. I’m past caring at this point though, multiple poor decisions and and an utter lack of attention to PvP has me fed up.
I’m done. Poor balancing, skills that haven’t been fixed since head start, poorly planned and implemented updates, awful awful meta designed around a handful of boring “best” specs for each class which in themselves are based around burst and bunkers, “Fixes” that don’t fully fix an issue while also introducing new issues… the list goes on and on. I wasn’t expecting amateur hour, I was expecting a AAA release from a veteran developer.
Some of you will agree – others will not (I was that person a month ago, telling me to be patient and give the game a chance), some will outright flame. It doesn’t matter. I’m not posting this to sway your opinions, I’m just posting this so on the (extremely) off chance a Dev see’s this, they can see how they’ve turned my enthusiasm and devotion for their product into utter contempt. Every single class board has a list of bugs, poorly designed skills, and poorly functioning skills that just isn’t acceptable in a nigh 6 month old game. Your communication is extremely lacking, and your philosophy of “small, gradual changes” doesn’t work in a month by month format – any other competent MMO i’ve played delivers large changes on a month by month timeline, and consistent small fixes on a much more rapid schedule.
With all that said, I still have the ever present need to be fair – the lack of a subscription fee, and the purely cosmetic PvP upgrades give me hope. This game might suck for another 3-6 months, but when it is finally fully functional and solidly designed, I’ll be able to pick it back up for free, and there won’t be a gear gap between me and those of you who decide to keep playing.
There’s a gem here ANet – you made alot of risky choices that paid off – when this game is good, its great. Unfortunately, I’m sick of shifting through a ton of kitten to catch a glimpse at the facet of said gem. You clean up the kitten, and I’ll be back. Til then, good luck; you’re going to need it.

Nicely put, my thoughts exactly. I was a complete enthusiast…I couldn’t get enough…and now I check back to the forums once a week to see if it’s been fixed, if I even remember to do that.

I still have hope but it’s fading quickly. I completely agree with you.

Agreed. Exactly how I felt a month ago. Quick tip – don’t bother visiting forums too often, you’re not gonna see anything new, and only dev posts you can expect will be ‘we can’t talk about it yet, will tell you more when it’s ready’. Dropping by once a month is more than enough.

Since I stopped playing GW2 I finally got around to catching up with some other games I wanted to play, I suggest you do the same. Just reinstalled Skyrim with a couple nice mods, should last me till Feb patch. And if nothing changes till then, I guess I’ll be done with GW2 for good.

Unfortunately you’re right i got bored of pvp after the first week the game were released. And it feels like it doesn’t matter if you win or not.
in counter strike for instance striving to win feels like a goal.

the gem is in 5v5, but i agree that currently you have to wade through some unnecessary steps to get there. i disagree on your balance issues. we have a beta-sized testing community for builds & most players follow trends rather than setting their own.

i think you have the right mentality for where you’re at wrt this game—take a break & come back in 6 months.

ppl quit gw1 for periods of time as well. the non-sub model works, because huge releases do bring players back.

faeral.7120:

the gem is in 5v5, but i agree that currently you have to wade through some unnecessary steps to get there. i disagree on your balance issues. we have a beta-sized testing community for builds & most players follow trends rather than setting their own.

i think you have the right mentality for where you’re at wrt this game—take a break & come back in 6 months.

ppl quit gw1 for periods of time as well. the non-sub model works, because huge releases do bring players back.

All I did were 5v5’s once they came out, haven’t been in an 8v8 since – without them I would have been gone months ago. 8v8 is literally pointless, I have no idea why it still exists – classes and encounters aren’t based around it, so fights feel lopsidded and much too quickly paced very often. After playing 5v5 for a few days, I’m puzzled as to why I ever ran 8v8.

As for balance, I disagree – Bunkers are too strong in the current meta, and absolutely no fun to fight. Burst trivializes combat against any non bunker (its no fun to fight the"unload everything I can then try to escape if it didn’t work" spec that any class tries to run), but is necessary to counter the level of bunkering they’ve allowed – burst and bunkering need to be toned down to a moderate degree. Melee is mess thanks to the amount of AoE in group fights, and how much damage it does. Not being able to use stunbreakers immediately when “in the air” makes KB/KD/Pull/Launch more powerful than other stuns – classes with high access to these skills are more powerful and effective because they get “Stun+”, while the rest of the playerbase just gets “Stun”.

As for “setting trends rather than following”…man I’ve tried. Between traits, weapons, amulets and jewels, I’ve probably tried over 100 distinctly different setups on my thief; Even ones that look like they make absolutely no sense on paper, just to see if maybe I missed something. The result is all the same – none of them can hold a candle to the small handful of tPvP effective specs. It’s not as if I Don’t know what I’m doing -early in the game, when Pistol MH was considered completely useless by the entire playerbase, I screwed around and ended up rolling 0/0/30/20/20 P/D conditions spec. I’m not claiming to have “invented it”, but I got 5-10 PM’s daily, some players accusing me of cheating, other theives asking me how the hell I was doing what I was doing…I was definitely running it before alot of people had even thought of it. There is very, very little variety in this game currently, a sign of poor design. Even WoW PvP had an arena effective spec for each of the talent tree’s (at least when I played), and 3 effective specs per class is more than some classes in GW2 get.

But Yeah, I’ll pop in now and then, check out the patch notes (and shake my head, sighing, like the last 2 times), and wait. Hopefully they’ll fix this before the entire playerbase finds something better to play.

evilapprentice.6379:

As for balance, I disagree – Bunkers are too strong in the current meta, and absolutely no fun to fight. Burst trivializes combat against any non bunker (its no fun to fight the"unload everything I can then try to escape if it didn’t work" spec that any class tries to run), but is necessary to counter the level of bunkering they’ve allowed – burst and bunkering need to be toned down to a moderate degree. Melee is mess thanks to the amount of AoE in group fights, and how much damage it does. Not being able to use stunbreakers immediately when “in the air” makes KB/KD/Pull/Launch more powerful than other stuns – classes with high access to these skills are more powerful and effective because they get “Stun+”, while the rest of the playerbase just gets “Stun”.

Seems pretty much a good summary of the current situation to me, and i’m really looking forward to the next balance patch, hoping this time it will bring something real to the table…

muscarine.5136:

evilapprentice.6379:

As for balance, I disagree – Bunkers are too strong in the current meta, and absolutely no fun to fight. Burst trivializes combat against any non bunker (its no fun to fight the"unload everything I can then try to escape if it didn’t work" spec that any class tries to run), but is necessary to counter the level of bunkering they’ve allowed – burst and bunkering need to be toned down to a moderate degree. Melee is mess thanks to the amount of AoE in group fights, and how much damage it does. Not being able to use stunbreakers immediately when “in the air” makes KB/KD/Pull/Launch more powerful than other stuns – classes with high access to these skills are more powerful and effective because they get “Stun+”, while the rest of the playerbase just gets “Stun”.

Seems pretty much a good summary of the current situation to me, and i’m really looking forward to the next balance patch, hoping this time it will bring something real to the table…

What kills me the most is the utter lack of communication. The Dev’s realize the community would be a lot calmer and more patient if someone was talking to us, right? Acknowledging our concerns, giving us some sort of timeline (even if its vague as hell). I’ve specifically bought some In game gems even though there was nothing I really “needed” because I thought Anet deserved an extra couple bucks – but its starting to look like they don’t even know the basics of MMO management.

Where’s our beta test server to test changes? It worked fantastically in RIFT – people played on the test servers to play-test design changes (essentially working for free) because they were excited to have more balanced content. They didn’t keep any of their rewards, they just had fun playing with more balanced, more fun content, and were eager to help the Dev’s with their suggestions and feedback. I know I’ve said this, but how is it possible that bugs and issues from head-start still exists 6 months in?

I agree that monthly updates are not how the game should be run. The last MMO I came from would do yearly surveys of their players, at the end of the games life (it’s still alive but barely) the devs released this huge post informing the community that after the years of surveys they realized that players would rather see smaller updates more frequesntly rather than waiting for months or a month at a time, see a huge chunk of content and changes, then the community realizes that their fix for their class or idea isn’t in these patch notes, then they have to wait another whole month or longer to hope the changes come out.

The company immediately re-structured and began having the devs release smaller updates more frequently and it was a success (too late for the game).

If you are going to continue with the small changes at a time, the patches need to be smaller and the updates need to be more frequently.

1.) Drop everything they’re doing.
2.) Bug fix.
3.) Try to fix poor traits and skills.
4.) +THEN + try to balance the game.

We’re playing a game where balance is based on the best of each profession vs the best of each profession. That’s because you’ve got so many bugs and so many bad traits/skills that you’re only seeing X competitive builds per profession.

Not a single person knows what is balanced/unbalanced if there were no bugs and if each profession didn’t have awful traits/skills.

i’m counting on a miracle from the febuary patch, as the state of the game is atm, of something like WoW announced F2P it’d DESTROY gw2.

@evilapprentice

I wanted to find fault in your post after reading the title alone, but could not.

your complaints are valid.

But I feel like your running your highlighter over only the bad things, and not the positive things arena net has created.
GW2 is the only mmo with a pvp system where you are instantly lv cap upon entering and can choose any gear you want free.

GW2 is the only mmo that thinks true balance starts with the separation of pvp and pve. balancing skills can come later.

GW2 is the only mmo with a server vs server vs server gametype that spans across 4 maps and uses fun things like siege weapons, supply camps, and towers.

Plus the way the game is set up (able to join multiple guilds, fun events that reward all who participate, token system for dungeons = no rolling on loots) they took the competition out of pve and made it socialized, which strengthens the community.

If you have to quit, then quit. but your not going to find another game with all this.

NeedCoffee.1402:

@evilapprentice

I wanted to find fault in your post after reading the title alone, but could not.

your complaints are valid.

But I feel like your running your highlighter over only the bad things, and not the positive things arena net has created.
GW2 is the only mmo with a pvp system where you are instantly lv cap upon entering and can choose any gear you want free.

GW2 is the only mmo that thinks true balance starts with the separation of pvp and pve. balancing skills can come later.

GW2 is the only mmo with a server vs server vs server gametype that spans across 4 maps and uses fun things like siege weapons, supply camps, and towers.

Plus the way the game is set up (able to join multiple guilds, fun events that reward all who participate, token system for dungeons = no rolling on loots) they took the competition out of pve and made it socialized, which strengthens the community.

If you have to quit, then quit. but your not going to find another game with all this.

I agree – I tried to point out the positives. I acknowledge that there’s something great down there, under all the bugs, class design issues, and current meta. I fully expect when all my complaints are addressed, this will be a truly amazing game. The problem is, all the things you’ve pointed out only count when the issues I pointed out are fixed. As long as those issues remain, all the positives you listed count for nil. Being Lvl 80 for PvP is great, unless PvP is boring, stale, and riddled with bugs. Separated skills are great, when all the skills work and are well designed. The cross server design would be very robust, if sPvP wasn’t a ghost town due to all the issues.
It’ll hopefully be great one day – but all those great features just make the outstanding issues (which have been issues for months now) all the more heartrending – I can see how awesome this game could be, if only the developers had the resources/time/skill to fix it.

There’s certainly a lot wrong, so don’t hear me saying everything is fine. However:

—the meta has evolved somewhat already. Teams only use one bunker now. It’s not really fair to say there is still a “bunker meta,” when team composition is 4 dps/1 bunker. However, seeing nearly every team run one guardian for mid point does say something about how necessary having one guardian is.

—Balance is actually pretty good for an MMO’s first year, especially considering the lack of a traditional trinity to make balancing easier (in a traditional trinity, all tanks can survive about the same length of time, dps classes have similar damage output, healers have similar heal outputs).

—On crowd control: engineers were supposed to be masters of the “stun+” cc you describe, yet they are considered one of the 2 weakest professions. I think balance is much more complex than “who has access to the most skills of type x.”

On the other hand, the current pvp population basically says that the negatives do outweigh the positives for most people who try GW2 pvp, so essentially the OP is correct. However, I choose to be cautiously optimistic about the future.

I actually think “small, gradual changes” would be fine if it was coupled with active communication.

It is both the absence of any meaningful dialogue coupled with the small changes that is infuriating.

With one or the other we would be able to see that they know what is going on, but as it stands many of us are convinced that they don’t know the full extent of the problems and are in no hurry to fix them.

Honestly, for all the complaints about balance, it really isn’t terrible, especially if you’ve played enough MMOs to know how bad it gets. WoW is certainly not a good example of game offering multiple PvP builds nor well designed PvP. Gear stat creep, gear grind, OP comps, little build variety(played mage/rogue…pretty much 1 spec), etc. And these are unfixed problems persisting through multiple expansions and balance shifts. Loved the gameplay, its just a popular example of pvp system shuffled to the side to push units rather than promote quality. Its also an example of how sweeping changes can ruin any sort of consistency in your PvP. I’d like Anet to be able to take a middle ground, make bigger changes if needed, but don’t go to far. No pvp designer will ever know completely how a community will exploit the changes.

There are certainly a ton of problems for GW2, but I think chief among them is how barren the features are. I haven’t played consistently for a while because I see no way to push myself in this current framework. I’m caught in the yawning void that consists of “frees” and “paids”. This, however, has been discussed multiple times, but the features the devs saying are coming “soon” can’t come soon enough if there is a chance for revival.

Bunker and burst does need to be toned down, but features are whats needed.

agree with op. I check in every week or so, see if anythings changed. nothing much has changed in the last month, far as i can tell

I’m guessing you posted this because you haven’t seen much of a chance in balance/bugs in quite a while. That because programmers are working on Matchmaking atm. AKA letting Newbies playing with newbies and pros with pros. Also that’ll give another progression system with in itself.

After that they’ll return to fixing bugs and balance….I think. Most competitive PvP’ers have put down the game until then so don’t feel bad. Also the influx of competitive players might breath some life into the Meta/builds and bring to light some more of the problems.

RustyEyeballs.8927:

I’m guessing you posted this because you haven’t seen much of a chance in balance/bugs in quite a while. That because programmers are working on Matchmaking atm. AKA letting Newbies playing with newbies and pros with pros. Also that’ll give another progression system with in itself.
.

link please? no blog wish list thank

Shukran.4851:

RustyEyeballs.8927:

I’m guessing you posted this because you haven’t seen much of a chance in balance/bugs in quite a while. That because programmers are working on Matchmaking atm. AKA letting Newbies playing with newbies and pros with pros. Also that’ll give another progression system with in itself.
.

link please? no blog wish list thank

Pretty sure matchmaking was mentioned in the blogpost on the front page and in a state of the game about s month ago.

Previously staunch defender of Anet – based on how much promise the sPvP had.

6 months in we got 1 new map.
6 months in we didn’t get:
- Custom arenas
- Leaderboards
- New game modes
- Matchmaking
- Dueling
^ all of which were promised a long, long time ago.

To be honest I think the devs underestimated how succesful PVE & WVW was going to be and changed their dev time accordingly.

The end result is that PVP at the moment has a couple of thousand players*. At peak times.

*Note: completely arbitrary number. However, considering both free & especially paid tournament queue times at peak times {Zeus help you if you queue for Paids in non-peak times} I really don’t think I’m far off.

The OP has hit the nail on the head. There is good pvp game here somewhere, unfortunately here we are 6 months later and nobody knows when its going to get here.

The plan seems to have been to just put in the bare amount necessary to sell the box to potential pvpers then just string us along forever until they get something together.

It seems to have worked based on the number of sales and GOTY awards.

Jacobin.8509:

The OP has hit the nail on the head. There is good pvp game here somewhere, unfortunately here we are 6 months later and nobody knows when its going to get here.

The plan seems to have been to just put in the bare amount necessary to sell the box to potential pvpers then just string us along forever until they get something together.

It seems to have worked based on the number of sales and GOTY awards.

It’s fairly obvious we paid to finish up their PvP beta tests. Honestly, that doesn’t bother me much – its SOP for MMO’s at this point. You’re always going to need to tweak once the meta gets established, some skills wont work out the way you anticipated, and so on. What’s killing me is the length of this beta. They’re not rolling out fixes and adjustments, they’re tweaking skills/traits/weapons that work while completely ignoring the list of skills/traits/weapons that don’t, and they’re completely ignoring the fact that nearly every class has only 1 or 2 functioning TPvP setups because of it. We’re just sitting in this stagnant pool of crap, getting copy/paste promises of how awesome this game will be at some unidentified point in the future.

Well it’s not the train wreck that diablo 3 PvP was. Gah I can’t wait! Anet ladder matchmaking soon!

Venoma.7052:

Previously staunch defender of Anet – based on how much promise the sPvP had.

6 months in we got 1 new map.
6 months in we didn’t get:
- Custom arenas
- Leaderboards
- New game modes
- Matchmaking
- Dueling
^ all of which were promised a long, long time ago.

To be honest I think the devs underestimated how succesful PVE & WVW was going to be and changed their dev time accordingly.

The end result is that PVP at the moment has a couple of thousand players*. At peak times.

*Note: completely arbitrary number. However, considering both free & especially paid tournament queue times at peak times {Zeus help you if you queue for Paids in non-peak times} I really don’t think I’m far off.

Lets not forget these huge class changes we were promised atleasti wht specific classes ( ranger anyone?) Also many of the very obvious bugs that are also quite gamebreaking such as the random obstruction bug for ranged. Ive personally quit tpvp all together, its boring, and the wait isnt worth it. I spvp just for the lawls and trash talking but Im going to take my talents too WvW since that seems like its still fun.

The only class Im interested in is ranger and yet the class is pigeon holed into 2 builds, evasion tank and traps, I play to snipe with a longbow, not be forced to play builds I dont want to play. I never thought Id feel like they did a better job with gw1 ranger but they did. I cant really bring myself to log on much anymore and am currently waiting for The game Neverwinter and Elder Scrolls Online to come out before I quit completely. Id really hope that anet can fix the many issues and possibly make ranger more interesting to play and stronger from ranged, and fix many of the glaring pet issues. I agree with the OP, well written criticism, this game just isnt worth more than a couple months entertainment atm. Off to lvl other peoples toons for cash until I find something to do.

ranger has lots of viable builds. power/BM, tanky bleeds/BM , tanky power SB, bunker, traps, all of which are viable.

ESO and Neverwinter are gonna blow hard, so get ready for it. so will all the Korean games. sorry to say, but GW2 is probably your only hope.

“August 28th, 2012: It wasn’t ready.”

Honestly, this is what drives me furthest up the walls: I love GW2 because it does so many good things so well (movement control, active dodging, the overall look, ect), but then I hate, hate, hate it because it does so many basic things so poorly (poor skill responsiveness, bugged traits and skills, bugged EVERYTHING ELSE, no variety in PvP, ect). More importantly, it feels like half of the game spits in the face of all of the good things about GW1.

Sometimes I wish ANet would just take the game away from me. Just one day come out and say: “Nope, it’s got all these issues that collectively make this a bad game right now. So we’re taking it away and we’ll be back in two months with a good game.”

I mean, I could write a thesis on the things that make GW2 a bad game—THAT’S NOT GOOD. AND DON’T MAKE ME DO IT BECAUSE IT WON’T MEAN ANYTHING because ANet doesn’t listen to anything on here. I’m just sitting here. With this game. With all of its problems. Identifying the problems and discussing solutions with friends. And then we all collectively know that the ideas that we have are worthless. It’s HORRIFIC. HORRIFIC.

we are currently playing a beta of what gw2 could be – just take it easy and w8. ^^

I came to this same conclusion a month or so ago. Still hang around the forums now and then to see if things are going the right way.

I don’t think we give Anet enough credit on the balance front. Looked at in a vacuum, evilapprentice is entirely right, but compare GW2 balance to other games and it comes off better.

Sure, there are only 1 or 2 specs that work per class, but that’s at least as good as any other MMO I have ever played.

True, the relationship between bunkers, burst and hybrid is exactly as evil says but at least we have very few “I win” classes and it’s not the r-p-s situation of WoW.

However, giving Anet credit is one thing, but I can’t really disagree with how stale the GW2 PvP is. For me it is more about game modes. There is zero variety, so every match feels identical and the tactics on each map hardly vary. After a gazillion runs, that’s bound to feel boring.

I like your post Gribbage. But again, I don’t think that game modes variety is the biggest problem. GW1 GvG only had one game type and it was doing fine. LoL or other competitive games also only use one game type (mostly) on a limited number of maps and they are successfull.

I don’t mind a point capture game mode, it can be fun sometimes, but I have to agree with the fact that it doesn’t look or feel very attractive. Kills aren’t rewarded that much, builds remain stale, strategies are repetitive. Even to watch it isn’t that enjoyable, the fight is spred over many different places, people are sometimes “wasting” time capping for 20 seconds… My point is : we don’t NEED game mode variety, we just need a better game mode that capture the point.

But even with capture the point we could start something, this is NOT the biggest problem of the game mode ATM. What is lacking the most are features that would build a real community. I don’t care about rewards (we played GW1 GvG without rewards for months), but about other features that makes you want to delve into the system and get better at it : tutorials (to get into it), easy access to noob matches (to not be destroyed in your first games), spectator modes (to learn from pros), rankings (to see your progression), official sponsored championships (to get hype !), official news with presentations of the top teams, etc.

I wanted to love sPvP, but I can’t. I still play it sometimes and can have fun for about an hour, but that’s it.