Guild Wars 2

It’s not often I’d say this, but – ANet has just fixed a bug that I believe was adding value to the game, and personally I’d like to see it, or a variant, put back.

In sPvP, when autobalance kicks in because one team is rather larger than the other, a prompt pops asking members of the larger team whether they’d like to volunteer to change teams. 20 seconds later, rebalance happens.

For some weeks, that message has “incorrectly” been visible to all players, not just those on the larger team. Which is undoubtedly not what was intended to happen – but has been absolutely invaluable.

If you’re spectating, trying to get into the larger team, and autobalance pops, with the alert popping as designed you have no choice but to sit there spamming clicks on the “join team” button of your choice for up to 30 seconds, in hopes that you’ll just happen to be the first person to click once the timer expires (no choice because if you don’t, you simply won’t get in, so everyone’s doing the same). Which is both tiring and unhealthy.

With the “bug”, we still had to spam clicks – but we had a convenient count-down timer on the autobalance, so it was merely necessary to click for the last second or so of the timer’s run. Much less stressful, much less chance of inducing RSI. The only thing actually “wrong” was that everyone got a clickable button, whereas only the players on the larger team were actually being asked to click.

I’m not personally aware of any undesirable side-effect of the bug – so how about accepting the happy accident and putting it back? Maybe change the prompt for the players not on the largest team, to remove the button itself?