Guild Wars 2

Are you working on balance issues as you promised? The PvP team have already began working on the Game Modes in accordance to the demand in the Collaborative Development threads, and not only that. They’re working on the rewards simultaneously, so what exactly is your excuse here?

Meglobob.8620:

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

Absolute rubbish.. its not real war, only in your head.. it’s a game and as such for players to keep coming back it needs much better balance than what is on offer currently.. but so far it’s not been ANET’s strong point in any facet of the game.
Without balance the disparity only gets worse as players migrate to stacked servers or worse, from the game all together.. you might call 70+ zergwars pounding on empty structures good for the game, but I don’t .. and if Season 1 did anything it was to highlight just how poorly managed population, PPT and risk/reward really is.
As for class balance, that will never be totally balanced in any MMO but neither should that be an excuse for allowing it to become a one trick pony zerg either.

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

People always keep talking about making some kind of mechanical balance for WvW, but how would you actually do that?

Keep in mind that you need to do it in a way that doesn’t punish people (such kitten people per map or something like that).

Meglobob.8620:

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

Yes because real war was online and folks did it for fun on their evenings and weekends?

PvP in all its forms, including WvW, is about competition and competition should be balanced if it is going to be worth doing. In the case of WvW it is not so much balancing class vs class, but server vs server, ie coverage wars.

Meglobob.8620:

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

Maybe in the strictest definition this is true, but overall class balance must still be there or WvW is a complete waste of time. Right now the current meta doesn’t support the entire medium armor family. Rangers in fact are nearly useless to the current meta. Mesmers bring 2 forms of utility and no one cares what else they do. We have Guardians and Warriors that clearly blow every other class out of the water with Necros not being too far behind.

If sPvP was mostly balanced, WvW would be too. But it’s not even close and many of the problems, even the slight ones that skate by and are ignored because they aren’t ‘too bad’, in sPvP are blown out of proportion in WvW.

No, the CD thread was just a distraction, they never really intended to do anything. Lets face it our Dev is probably the most stubborn of all of them, time and again he has shown if its not his idea he just doesn’t care. Not very good for business, I’m sure Anet will wise up one day.

It is difficult to work on Balance when a lot of classes have a variety of ways to play them, like a Ranger that can be great in 1 on 1 fights but the same build is pretty useless in Keep takes, defends or zerg battles.

How do you balance that?

Meglobob.8620:

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

Yours is possibly the most ignorant post I’ve seen in months. Population imbalance has a HUGE influence on the nature of WvW. In imbalanced matches (i.e., most of them), player interest drops off dramatically after reset because players know that the match isn’t going to give them good mass battles, trying to capture and defend objectives is a lost cause, and anyone dedicated enough to play is going to be limited to a small subset of the intended play style.

Nobody is saying that WvW needs to be “fair”, as in every team having the same access to skill, organization, communication, and leadership. But WvW DOES need to be balanced in terms of population. People can still have fun playing 5v5 pickup basketball against a better team, but NOBODY has fun playing basketball 5v2 and the same holds true here.

ANet doesn’t embrace fixing the population imbalance in WvW because they don’t know how to do it, so they spout the same “it was never meant to be fair” garbage that you did, but if they actually meant it there would never have been queues by server (it would just be one mass queue for the map) and they wouldn’t have had to implement high fees for server transfers or prohibit guesting for WvW. The “servers” in GW2 (including WvW) are not fixed hardware servers. ANet leases server capacity en masse from Akamai … it’s a distributed system and ANet never actually sees the specific hardware that the game runs on. The whole idea of “servers” in GW2 is a virtual environment.

Population imbalance was the number one issue for WvW as voted by the player base, but it got short sheeted in the CDI process and nothing has come from it. Your post just rubs salt in our wounds.

NargofWoV.4267:

It is difficult to work on Balance when a lot of classes have a variety of ways to play them, like a Ranger that can be great in 1 on 1 fights but the same build is pretty useless in Keep takes, defends or zerg battles.

How do you balance that?

By giving them another spec to specialize in that can hold its own while also ensuring they provide enough utility and support to be worthwhile to a group regardless of spec. The same way you do it for any class.

Having a roaming/small group and large group spec isn’t something new in this game. Having a roaming build be 100% useless to a zerg, well that could arguably be considered Ranger specific.

NargofWoV.4267:

It is difficult to work on Balance when a lot of classes have a variety of ways to play them, like a Ranger that can be great in 1 on 1 fights but the same build is pretty useless in Keep takes, defends or zerg battles.

How do you balance that?

As much as I’ve loudly complained about imbalance in WvW, my ire is directed toward population imbalance only. I agree that class balance is an issue for many players, but we at least have a CHOICE of which classes we play. We don’t have any control at all over population imbalance … certainly not as individuals.

I play a non-burst thief because I like the mobility and the play style, and in many situations in WvW I can make a contribution even though I am next to useless in other situations. That’s my choice, and if I wanted to be more useful in other situations I could level a different class. But if my server is forced to play against servers with significantly higher populations I become useless in almost ALL situations, and the game becomes MUCH more restricted for me, and that’s just not right. My only recourse then becomes to switch to a stacked server, and for the health of the game that’s just plain stupid. Other games are on the horizon that specifically promise to be better for this, and that’s going to rip WvW a new one.

Population imbalance and class imbalance are, in my opinion, totally different issues for WvW.

They can deal with overloaded kits that rewards button mashing or Ranger pets being extremely useless and bad for PVP with lots of bugged and “I will just cancel your commands” moment later.

As other had stated, I just wish they do something about the population issue. The people I play with are pretty much discussing about moving servers now. Give “Outnumbered” an actual buff that isn’t the rub in your face “You can get more loots and exp assuming you somehow win”.

Or an alliance system where two servers are joined to form a single team for W v W v W based on the ranking (1st would be paired with last and so on) which will helps even out the population issue a bit.

The populations do need to be balanced, but ANet won’t do anything about it.

They said when the game was released that this was how it was going to be played, that’s why people made super servers in the first place. I don’t think they indicated a change in their stance since then.