Guild Wars 2

This game is not an esport because of game play. Period.
There are more things wrong with what arena net did to GW2 than right, you can make a huge list of everything they did to mess up their possibility of making anything other than a casual friendly game. The list of things they did right.. I can’t really thing of any off the top of my head.

The complexity of this game is not high. Don’t think for a second the problem is people can’t get into it. People simply aren’t motivated to get into it. I tried playing the other day after not having played since release. Had no idea what my skills did. Got kitten D twice, then after that I killed everyone who came to my point. This is NOT a complex game. It may LOOK complex due to a large number or particles, but the game play is far from it. In fact, I would argue the lack in skill cap is a larger detriment to it’s success.

Other games such as LoL and truely competitive games have a huge skill cap, so I always feel like I have room to improve. In GW2, I recall feeling as if i pretty well mastered my class within the 3 or 4 weeks that I played it. Having situations where the game is simply, ‘easy’ implies there lacks depth. When there lacks depth, you lose sight of any big play because well frankly, such a thing can’t exist if there isn’t anything hard to do mechanically in the game.

You also have to keep in mind the gamemode selected hurt them dramatically. Conquest cannot and will not ever be a competitive format in any game that should be revolving around heavy teamplay. It does not support a game evolution, and that evolution is what makes things fun to watch. For a matter of fact, the fact that they expect stronghold to only take 15 minutes is a HUGE negative since this is hardly enough time for the game to evolve and create drama that would make it compelling to watch or play. Anet consistently had this problem in GW1 as well where they kept thinking shorter games are what everyone wants. It’s true, we don’t want 1.5 hour long games… but really.. 15 minutes?

Oh, and passive effects are not really a detriment IF there are ways to stop them. One of the gems of GW1 was the complex layers of defense that needed to be, ‘cracked’ before you could kill a player on the enemy team. It was a fantastic concept where the concept of fighting each other wasn’t about blowing someone up in a skirmish, but working together to create and then take advantage of kitten in their heavy amount of both passive and active defenses. Passive defenses are good, so long they can be stopped. [Although, I will agree that passive damage is primarily stupid in most cases when its THE only source of damage – GW1 these types of things only server as a means of pressure, generally not the killer in its own right until Anet messed up and ruined the game.]

This energy bar is a new resource that the revenant relies on in order to use skills. Some skills will have a low energy cost, allowing you to use them more often, while others have a large cost with a very large payoff.

…Only Anet would introduce a well known resource and act like its something new…

I have to fundamentally disagree with the notion of attacking gates = fun. That’s kind of a silly argument. What’s fun about attacking a gate for 60 seconds to destroy it? I can say that their solution is a good solid attempt to find a way around playing attack the gate and towards playing the map.

With that being said, I still think this gamemode is a terrible idea. It will get back next to none of the original crowd that they are hoping to gather. This still poses the same problem that capture points did, it doesn’t promote cohesive teamfights – rather people all split up handling different tasks and maybe occasionally merging together to accomplish a push.

I will say this once more as I have many many times…
An RPG PvP NEEDS to be a completely teamfight focused play style where the combat revolves around prolonged full out XvX combat. Not small skirmishes.

Liberis.9573:

Why wouldn’t ArenaNet copy ideas from the most popular esports in the world?

Because that game already exists. Whats the best they can hope for? A nearly identical play style game which seeks to capture from the same competitive audience but fails to take market share since LoL is already so well established?

And by the way, I understand that the current iteration of the game is not identical to a MoBA. But go through and listen to their cast and pay attention to how they discuss it. You can tell that many of the mechanics they placed around the map were modeled after game aspects or ideas borrowed from MoBAs. They even talked about why they COULDN’T make it even MORE like them, which should be evidence enough as to what their intent was.

Malediktus.3740:

Diage.6451:

Malediktus.3740:

Everything that can be done has already been done in games. So you can only copy it and try to improve it.

…And then Mobas were created. Besides, there isn’t a competitive RPG.. the only people who did anything close to that was GW1.

Heh…

“were” = past tense
the more stuff got invented already, the harder it becomes to make a true invention without just finding a new name for it.

Before MoBAs were created, no one knew about MoBAs…. You can’t now magically say, ‘oh well back then we didn’t explore just that one avenue, but now we got everything!’
Besides, the irony is I am not asking for something 100% new – I am asking for them to explore the thing they ALREADY did in the past and not just leave it to rot.

Harbinger.8637:

MOBAs are vastly popular and successful atm, so it makes sense that Anet would try to emulate them in order to revitalize the pvp scene.

Ya, and the scene is already dominated by someone and you would have to somehow magically take market share from them if you wanted to compete for it. Why do that when you can create your own thing and fight for a new spot in the competitive gaming scene? That’s kind of a silly argument, no one will knock League off the top MoBA spot. Even if someone made a superior game, the fact that they have as much of a fanbase as they do means you won’t be able to take them down.

Malediktus.3740:

Everything that can be done has already been done in games. So you can only copy it and try to improve it.

…And then Mobas were created. Besides, there isn’t a competitive RPG.. the only people who did anything close to that was GW1.

Heh…

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Games copy or take inspiration from other games all the time (could substitute with other types of media too). It is not inherently bad as you are implying.

Also, seems to me like they are picking and choosing the elements of a typical moba game that they think works best in a guild wars 2 setting rather than just copy >>>> paste and that really is the best way to do it.

There’s something different happening here though.
I can almost imagine the thought process from start to finish when they were making this game mode, especially since it sounded almost like they initially copied and pasted Moba game play in (this is inferred from some of the comments in the twitch video.) I am fairly certain that the way they went into the conversation about creating the game mode was, ‘how do we implement this game play within our game?’

That is substantially different then them having their own game idea, and borrowing from other games to enhance their core idea. And by the way, you ever notice how each genre effectively has 1 power house anymore and they are seldom if ever knocked off that despite HUGE numbers of attempts? CS, WoW, LoL – try to make copies and borrow from them all you want, marginally better improvements on already existing ideas won’t take down the games that already have the substantial playerbase and market share established.

Jamais vu.5284:

Diage.6451:

Why is it that a company who focused so heavily on creating a completely unique pve game experience and went through so many risks to try to setup something unique in that environment, and then go to pvp (the thing GW1 was most known for) and start copying other game modes? This conundrum will always deeply confuse and depress me.

You have not played GW1. Proof: You don’t know about the popular game mode Stronghold is based on (Fort Aspenwood), which was already in GW1.

GW2 newbs are funny.

Heh.. I played GW1 for 6 years, specifically playing GvG in 5.5 of those 6 years. The fact that someone comes to me in a competitive game mode discussion fighting for Fort Aspenwood speaks directly to the issue of audience appeal that Anet has. Fort Aspenwood is not even remotely close to anything that could or ever would be a competitive format. Sure, it was fun place to pvp for pvers, but it was not a true pvp in any sense of the word.

leman.7682:

Is Stronghold going to be a success? Yes, considering how big of a failure Conquest is.
Is Stronghold going to be the best PvP mode ever? Unlikely, considering how dull it looks compared to both DOTA2 and GW1 GvG.

That phrases my thought process on this perfectly.

ronpierce.2760:

Well, I tend to think of it like this, a lot of people like the idea behind MOBAs but prefer MMORPG mechanics. This sort of caters to a hybrid spectrum that raw mobas really can’t cater to. Like me, I hate mobas. I hate the currency systems they run, I hate the general play of them. But this sounds great and very fitting for me. I think you can take a general theme and apply it differently and come up with an entirely new concept, just with obvious roots.

I think that’s the same mentality that Anet has as well. There’s a problem with that though.. Think about it like a venn diagram. You have the entire population of players who like MMOs and the entire population of players who like MOBAs. The combination of the two is a smaller segment of either total population. So instead of being true to your game mode, you have to appeal to both. What’s worse is that since you are going against the MoBA community, you have to fight against the things both MoBA players want to play AS WELL as the things RPG players want to play. So of that small intersection, you now need to find those who would rather play this than other alternatives such as League as well as those who would rather play this other than alternatives such as WoW.

Point being, although that mentality can be nice if you live in that small population, you won’t get a large audience because frankly, the audience you’ve selected to appeal to is small! (For a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons no one stuck around for GW2 conquest, it wasn’t QUITE what they wanted from their respective genres AND there were better alternatives.)

Your best chance of success would be to make a game that is TRUE to what you are and has the SMALLEST competition. There is no true competitive RPG gamemode and you ARE an RPG. Seems logical really.

ronpierce.2760:

I think its fine. Its less clashy like Mobas, and I feel it has more room for build uniqueness. Not to mention, the core gw2 mechanics are well > MOBAs. I’d rather let it play out before saying its a TOTAL rip off, though it clearly has parts taken from other things.

That’s to be expected though. GW2 didn’t create the warrior class. :P

I didn’t declare it a ripoff really, but when you make a gamemode that attempts to appeal to the same play styles and mentalities of another already existing gamemode or genre, you put yourself in the position of competing with that gamemode or genre. The mentality of objective control and lanes takes directly from mobas and the fact that it is a primary attempt to focus heavily on map strategy over a lot of other mental decisions you would expect from RPG players.

Think about it like this, as a player of RPGs, there are certain expectations you have of an RPG. RPGs tend to be more team focused, build focuses, and you play in a cohesive fashion. When people go to play a MoBA, it is much more individualistic when talking about the micro sense of combat and teamwork comes heavily in your objective control and ‘map pressure.’
When you attempt to make a game, call it an RPG, but give it mechanics of something else, you’ve essentially declared that you only wish to grab a subsection of the audiences in both genres. If they instead focused on a gamemode that forced legitimate team focused combat which revolved around playing in a cohesive fashion, THAT would be a true RPG gamemode.

butch.8136:

Stronghold seems pretty unique to me. Every game is inspired by another game.

Is there a gamemode that is unique to MMO’s? Not that I know of.
Might be better to wait till you get to play it.

Actually.. There is a game mode that is completely unique to MMOs – GW1 GvG.
Now, there are a lot of smaller aspects combined to make it unique, which they themselves are not unique. You have to note what concepts are being taken, the spirit of GvG was and still is the most unique game mode out there.

You could tell how the way of thinking went, even in their little clip when they called the gaurds, ‘basically turrets.’ They made this with the explicit intent of trying to capture LoL and MoBA gamemodes.

And by the way, ‘wait until you try it’ is sort of silly. I could tell you exactly the problems that would happen with conquest maps and its the reason conquest will NEVER be a good solid competitive game mode.

But – in all honesty though, it could be a competitiveish gamemode. But it certainly won’t be genre breaking or standout because it tries too hard to take the place of something that already works. At best, you are getting only a tiny segment of the audience you SHOULD be capturing.

Your concern is hilarious to me.. I can’t help but feel that those who made GW2 are a 100% different group of people from who made GW1..
A snippet from the post in my signature (I want you to note that this post was done the September after the game was released):

But, guildwars 1 was by far closer than any other rpg has come to a fantastic and fundamentally outstanding pvp game.

There were two main reasons for this. One of which Anet clearly understood and one which I don’t think they grasped to the fullest extent.

- The first reason is their separation of pvp and pve into two distinct realms. This was huge in guildwars 1 and helped to make it the pvp oriented game that it later became. They learned this and it is a great thing they continued to bring that idea into GW2.
- The second reason is the extreme focus on a truly team oriented combat. I don’t think Anet truly grasped how powerful this was. Guildwars 1 is the only game where the concept of self was moved from individuals to teams. Sure, towards the end, some teams got carried by really good players. At the start however, when GW1 was at it’s prime, it required every player to be on their game to do the best they can. The team utterly failed if a single player made a mistake at a wrong time.

Note – when they released the game, they noted an intent to keep the game modes balances separate, but I guess they went back on that now?

I just watched the twitchy thingy-majig and got slightly disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, it looks quite literally orders of magnitude greater than conquest, but it just looks like they said – how can we implement League of Legends into our game?
When they first made their pvp, they asked how they could implement FPS into their game. They realized, “WAIT – our game is not an FPS!” (and kudos for that realization by the way.) However, now they seem to think their game is a MOBA.

I could write a small novel on why this is a terrible idea and what they could do to improve themselves and differentiate themselves in the market – but I’ve done that before and got no where (for those curious, look in my signature.) With that being said….

Why is it that a company who focused so heavily on creating a completely unique pve game experience and went through so many risks to try to setup something unique in that environment, and then go to pvp (the thing GW1 was most known for) and start copying other game modes? This conundrum will always deeply confuse and depress me.

Exedore.6320:

Dirame.8521:

I love your comparisons and I think you’re onto something but the significant thing I can see from your post is lack of information on what Stronghold is actually like, leading to you having little to say about it.

Hopefully we’ll get more later this month.

But I have thought about those possibilities, specifically NPCs being required to destroy gates and the use of a partial “payload” archetype. The problem with both of those is the over-reliance on NPCs which de-emphasizes the actual player-vs-player combat. Do you really want to see a “PvE specialist” role develop in a PvP format?

There is a strong misconception here. It is perfectly legitimate to have NPCs in pvp games under the right circumstances. Granted, it needs to be careful about how its done. I haven’t followed much on what the Stronghold will be like but I am deeply interested and it is the reason I even looked at these forums once more.

There really isn’t a huge precedent for NPCs in PvP gamemodes. You got the guildlord in GW1 and LoL. But there are so many possible ways to use NPCs, you simply can’t make a claim as to whether it’s viable or not. I do fully understand the gut reaction of saying npcs in my pvp is bad. But honestly, you should be a bit more open to the concept. They need to be sure that the NPCs add appropriate strategic depth to be worth their existence though.

Reikou.7068:

Hey Diage.

Its been a while.

I get the feeling that the reason they abbandoned gw1 style/formats of PvP boils down to them feeling it was “too elitist,” and not “bad player/scrub friendly” enough.

This “scrub friendly” mentality has permeated everything in this game even to the point where the leaderboards for competitive PvP don’t even show who the best players are anymore. Only those who grind the hardest. Apparently to “reduce elitism and give all players a chance.”

I can 100% agree that GW1 was overly complicated. As someone who has spent large amounts of my time studying game mechanics and design, I will note that when adding a component into a game you have to weigh its complexity/skill cap. The ideal competitive game has a high skill cap and low learning curve. GW1 had a very high skill cap, but a very high learning curve as well. Obviously, this helps to keep the game interesting and competitive but makes it difficult to attract new people to the audience and to keep people who take a break the ability to get back into the game. GW2 on the other hand went straight left field and reduced the skillcap to 0 as well as the complexity. So now all the truly competitive players left the scene because it really isn’t a challenging game at it’s core.

Anet needs to take a moment and ask what kind of game they’re making, what is their audience and evaluate the cost/gain of each of the mechanics they are adding and ask each of those mechanics is the cost to complexity worth the skill cap (or in their case, does this do anything to help us actually produce a higher skill cap.)

Saiyan.1704:

Diage.6451:

FrownyClown.8402:

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

The question to ask though is.. should it have been?

That’s pretty much any game with a sequel; it brings along new directors, programmers, etc. It can’t be helped. The Lore, however, is still pretty awesome. In the PvP aspect of things, they’ve acknowledged many issues us PvPers have been facing. Most notably Matchmaking, balance issues, even trying to implement new gamemodes. I myself am looking forward to Stronghold.

I would have been overly excited if there was a form of 2v2/3v3 type style of play but i’m sure there’s reasons as to why that hasn’t been implemented. When it comes down to number crunching, the majority of people simply preferred something like Stronghold and other, more favorable content.
Can’t blame them myself

Here’s the silly thing though…
This group of Anet litterally tore the ‘competitive’ world apart searching for inspiration to make a great pvp game. The irony behind that is simply that the best pvp for their format was right in front of them. Naturally, it wasn’t perfect… but instead of trying to fix the issues they scrapped it and instead tried going towards a game mode that was from other genres which means now they have to try to appeal to a very small niche of an audience instead of the general RPG audience they could have initially appealed to.

FrownyClown.8402:

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

The question to ask though is.. should it have been?

You assume a consistent player base as an excuse to make a certain game mode.

For one, the idea is that they make a gamemode that might bring players into the competitive team thereby rendering the total numbers of players argument useless. 2v2/3v3 deathmatch game modes are by nature not very competitive. They showcase individual micro level skills and do not showcase overarching rpg elements such as strategy, planning, and teamwork.

Second point, you (and Anet) need to recognize what Arena will be the ‘competitive’ arena and balance for that arena specifically. IF you were to pick a 2v2 arena, it needs to be an all-in by anet to decide that is the competitive format and make it good. Otherwise it’ll just result to a cheesy lame gamemode no one likes to play except for those who happen to be playing the op builds at the time.

When making a competitive game in an RPG format, you need the gamemode to reflect RPG elements to be a truly good competitive game. Otherwise, it’s no better than the attempts of every other RPG.

Here: Read up a little bit.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Lost-potential/first

So I pretty much quit this game right after release. I was a huge GW1 fan, best game I’ve ever played in the entirety of my gaming ‘career’ (by career I mean free time.)

When I left, part of the frustration was due to admins/developers/etc. not responding or recognizing the pvp community in any way shape or form. It seems like that might have changed?

So, below is a post i made the first September after the release of the game. Would it be unreasonable to ask a dev to tell me why the just left GW1 playstyle in the dirt (see the post for a full description of why GW1 was so good.)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Lost-potential/first

To bring back the same style of game in GW1 will require much more than a map.
GW1 did not have one of the greatest pvps of any game simply because of the gamemode, it was the intricacies and skill cap that evolved out of the gameplay. It seems like these devs are receptive to communication, much more so than in the past.. But even with that, the change it would require to make a competitive game is significant.

They’ve worked hard to make everything as basic and simple as possible to reduce the learning curve and appeal to a general audience. However, if they want a great game, they need to start changing the balance and mentality of how a game should be played. It should not be focused on this idea of separation and individuals, but rather focused on cooperative teamplay. Last time I checked, GW2 was an RPG not a MOBA. Why would they try to appeal to the MOBA audience when they should be looking to recapture the initial audience they had in GW1? (ADDED: What I mean is they need to be clear and not try to appeal to other audiences which are not the RPG base they need.)

The first thing Anet would need to do before ever making a gamemode is to sit back and ask honestly, who is our audience? Who are we making this game for? Right now, they are trying to make it for ‘everyone’ which is the worst audience to choose. Making it for everyone prevents many choices you could otherwise make to appeal to YOUR audience.

In any case, I am saying far more than I intended. Anet needs to not be asking about the game mode though. That won’t solve anything.. not until they begin to ask and dive into more important and deeper questions about their overall gameplay.

First time logging in since about a year. Devs are talking now? That’s outstanding!…..

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Lost-potential/first

*By the way, that was written a month after release.. pity it got locked, crazy productive thread IMO.

How sad I am that I missed such a great opportunity to attempt to influence game design choices! I haven’t been around the forums at all for awhile, with that said I need to do one thing before I jump into the body of the post!

A reference to my post that got sadly closed after a year. I figure this might help to keep it’s idea alive.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Lost-potential/page/3

Anyhow, to that concept and point above, unless Anet learns how to tie depth into their game modes, they will not be able to create a Game Mode that will have a competitive attraction.

As it sits, the balance of the game is heavily focused on individual combat that is additive in it’s nature. This means that if I have two players, the sum of the duo is equal to the sum of the individuals. This concept is influenced entirely by the balance and not the game mode. Keep in mind that the (beneficial) opposite to this is the duo is greater than the sum of the individuals. I want to note that combo fields do exist yes, but that is a superficial combination at best. It, at it’s core, has a lot of potential, but alone does not create true teamwork.

So yes, as the thread above died people were discussing the plausibility of the topic within it. The reality is that it is completely plausible since it would merely require a rebalance. The problem is that the balance would be cumbersome for pve players and would therefore require a split. It is also true that the rebalance would require a complete shift in mentality about how they feel combat should be played.

When sitting inside an MMORPG landscape, you must have that game play in mind. You cannot sit here in this genre and try to implement a game that plays like an FPS. At best with that sort of choice you find out that there is a medium sized audience who is interested in an RPG that feels like an FPS, at worst (and most likely) you completely alienate your audience by providing a game that fails to meet the expectations of an RPG.

I don’t really want to go into the extreme depth I did in that post because when I went into it, I felt as if I was heard only by the people who already knew. The people who need to know these things are the developers and if their track record proves true, there is no real hope for anything more than a large number of non-competitive game modes.

I will probably wander through these forums until this thread dies then go back to forgetting about GW2. In the meantime, if anyone want’s to discuss highly/semi-highly abstract game design as it pertains to GW2 pvp (or competitive pvp in general), let me know.

sorrow.2364:

Hello everyone…..

• Conquest mode encourages the new trinity:

The reality is that any good game mode is going to promote roles. A terrible game would be one where no one actually has a unique role and you all just sort of.. played… Something about competitive games is that you need to be the best at what you do, but not just that, your team needs to be better than the enemy team. The reality is that specializing in jobs (ie roles) will help to make your team more effective.

The question is, which roles do you want? I agree a bunker role is a lame and boring role and it is mandatory in the capture point setting.

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly:

I would sort of agree. Mainly because the ONLY type of team play that exists in conquest is communication. And everyone knows how much pugs love to communicate.

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding:

I sort of agree. It’s more or less that there is no opportunity for that game changing play. If you think about it right, in any normal good competitive game, a great play actually shifts the dynamics from losing to winning and can happen at almost any point in the match. Conquest however, at least in this setting, has the concept that that can only happen if you are sufficiently close to each other. Otherwise, you’re still losing, but now just by not as much. Point being, it doesn’t feel rewarding because either you just sort of win or you just sort of lose. The chance that a huge comeback happens is an abnormality.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand:

Actually, this is the reason (in my opinion) devs chose this, and it is because capture points are EXTREMELY easy to understand. You hold a point, and you get points. There are extra dynamics in it, but that’s about it. The extra dynamics are things that contribute to the skill cap, but the bigger problem with capture points is that there is practically 0 skill cap. This means that you pick it up easily, but you learn to master it just as easily.

I think you see people running in hot join and being generally bad at that and you mistake it for them being bad. In reality, they just most likely have different motives, like glory.

JonathanSharp.7094:

@ Rewards: We want to make it more fun to rank up and we want to provide more incentive to rank up. We also want to have more fun progression as you’re ranking up with cool rewards as you’re ranking.

We also don’t like how long it takes to rank up for some players after they hit a certain rank, so we’ll be addressing that as well.

@ Bigger maps: The idea right now is to make something that can scale in team size so that you can play it in bigger teams, or smaller teams. We also want to make sure we spread people out on the maps in a way that creates space, while also creating pockets where conflict is encouraged (and rewarded!).

This makes me sad.

Why work on rewards, rewards won’t get you new people and won’t make your game better. They’re nice but your problems are far greater than rewards.

And really.. sure, make your map bigger, don’t care about that part.. the part I care about is what you are going for in your game.. “We also want to make sure we spread people out on the maps in a way that creates space.”

I get it, you want to make collapsing more important. The problem is that your game will never be a good competitive game if your mentality as a developer is to create game modes that spread players out. You need to have natural spaces of conflict where a majority of the combat happens. This is not a moba where you roam for 20 minutes and then collapse because there is no gold incentive. This is an RPG where you need to focus on ATTRITION and enduring fights. Not collapsing.

That must be a troll. There is no way you can honestly think creating game modes to spread teams out is a good idea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Evan Lesh.3295:

This forum loves analogies :P

PvP is not currently designed to have extensible content. There are maps, which we do make. There are runes and sigils, but there are already an overabundance of them. Finally there are skins, which are added usually with every other update, but how you obtain those skins stem from PvE.

There are no features we can just ‘throw people at’ to give you guys more content. We need more infrastructure and more extensible systems, but those are the hardest to design and take the most time to implement. An example would be a completely reworked reward system. Those are the things we’re working on. It’s taking a lot of time and hard work to get there, but the payoff will be worth it.

Please for the love of god don’t tell me you’re wasting resources on a better reward system…………………………..

Evan Lesh.3295:

The updates exclusive to PvE and PvP are hard to compare. Almost all PvP features require very intensive programmer and server support like solo queue, matchmaking, custom arenas, spectator mode, etc. Living story updates leverage existing technology to advance the story and expand content with new mobs, crafting recipes, dungeons, etc. PvP has few areas expandable by content; the main feature being maps which we release regularly. Balance updates affect all parts of the game and don’t come out for one any faster for one than the other.

Woah.

You’re telling me in the five years you developed the game, no one had foresight to create objects that could make producing PvP game objects easier? I get the argument that say extending content in PvE is essentially the act of extending an already existing class model and reworking it whereas in PvP you have to design the entire template. I get that, but things like meta balance, observer mode, data collection to ensure a smoother understanding of your meta, effective queues, effective tournaments, reasonable gamemodes that make sense.. All things that you pioneered in GW1 or learned a lot about in GW1 weren’t included in the design phase initially developed in the five years it took you to make GW2?

It seems to me that if I were to make a game, especially from scratch, I would use as many lessons I already learned as possible. My goal wouldn’t be to shoot blindly in the dark at release, it would be to take all the lessons I’ve learned in the past from previous developments, all the lessons from playing other games, from life experiences, all those lessons and use them. Not just create my own kittenumptions that are unfounded.

If Anet was a new developer and they were making this game from scratch, didn’t take five years to develop and saying “guys, these things are hard to develop,” I would believe them. Unfortunately, Anet doesn’t have that luxury.

If I were in charge of this project I would have fired all of my designers for the lack of foresight here.

Real post:

@Anthrage.

To be fair, their target audience is casuals (which btw is a HORRIBLE audience if you want to make a competitive game, sorry casual players, but it’s true) and adding more active control is harder to master. Certainly, as you have reached the upper skill cap, it is easier to add more complexities onto that because you’re already at the top and learning the extra new stuff is not too hard. However, there is this concept of complexity creep whereby the devs will continually make the game slightly more challenging for their long term players because those long term players can in fact handle it. The problem with this is that it adds onto what all a new player has to learn. Just remember, they come in knowing nothing. So, like I said, tbf to Anet, I would agree that complexity is a concern.

HOWEVER. I think Anet has targeted the wrong audience completely for this game. Casual appeal can be great for some aspects of the game, they certainly tried to hit it hard for the pve and I think that’s great. However, there can’t be and shouldn’t be such a thing as “casual pvp.” Certainly, casuals should be able to play it occasionally, but if you want your game mode to be great you need to have a skill cap that can’t be achieved after a week and a half of playing.

IMO that is the problem with this game. It is the reason myself and all my friends ever stopped playing it. A monkey can achieve near perfect play after an incredibly short time playing it. There is no extra skill cap to the game mode. No skill cap to team play. No skill cap to individual play. It is exactly how they envisioned it, casual friendly.

And to that point, since that is their audience they should definitely not do this.

However, if they ever get serious about making this game a GOOD COMPETITIVE game, they need to give more active control and less passive.

showatt.9413:

If we were to receive this change, it is very likely we will have reduced damage on our pet as being able to maul three times (4 stack of bleed each maul) with 2 feline is just downright overpowered. You can keep bringing up gw1 as a template, but the dev already stated numerous time they weren’t trying to create a gw1 remake and the notion of ‘because gw1 did this so we should’ is tedious as it is.

Diage.6451:

If you have no expertise to make a conclusion.. you then have no right to even attempt to discuss that platform.. however, you didn’t just discuss it, you declared it the probable answer.

I AM a programmer.. It depends entirely on how they implemented their abstract for skills. If they’re half intelligent, it would be a pretty easy fix. All a skill should do is “Activate” and the events, despite whatever they may be, will follow from that command. All it would need is for activating the button to call the class that handles the animal AI and tell it to chomp.

This is of course assuming they are even the slightest tiniest bit intelligent.

I did say in advance – the first sentence in fact – and apologized before I even offered my take, so I really don’t understand what you’re getting so self righteous about.. Just because I said it was a probable answer, doesn’t mean I actually think I am right. (Otherwise I wouldn’t use the word probable right?)

It was an attempted guess, and I consider myself educated having worked with programmers in the past. I told everyone it was an attempted guess right from the start, and since none of us actually work for Anet, no one can say for sure how they’ve actually done their programmings.

Which company do you work for, if you don’t mind me asking? If you are such a good programmer that you would go as far as to doubt the capability of Anet’s programmers, who are industry veterans, I really want to know what company you work for and which games you’ve worked on.

When it comes to games, I am freelance, I do it for fun. However, I am the LSA for Ohio and Michigan within the Kroger Company. Actual title is KTM Operations Analyst Data Security. I have a bachelors degree in mathematics, bachelor in computer science and engineering and an associates in philosophy.

And btw, stating something is probable means you do in fact believe it to a high degree of certainty. It does not imply you believe it 100%, but obviously (as per the definition) you believe it to be probably true.

And btw, I didn’t doubt their ability. I said that they should have done some things given the assumption they are even the tiniest bit intelligent. This is, as stated, a very small assumption to make therefore you can come to my conclusion above.

A great game mode will have a primary objective which is hard to go after with secondary objectives that act as a means to an end for that primary objective. The secondary objectives cant be too numerous(3 would be pushing it) and they need to focus on forcing players to have a prolonged-attrition heavy battle.

That is a winning combination for a competitive game mode.

showatt.9413:

Dirame.8521:

showatt.9413:

Dirame.8521:

It was an 8 slot skill bar. We had fewer skills but freeform selection.

In that case it’s most probably a technical issue than a game design one.

I really don’t understand such a technical limitation. What would be limiting them to not do something like that? Especially when the pets themselves have special skills that they use when they feel like it.

I am by no means a programmer, so if my attempted answer is wrong, please forgive. With that disclaimer in mind, here is the potential answer to your question:

It is probable that pet skills exist on a different system to normal utility skill and weapon skills. If you were to make the pet skill replacing the utility skills it would be trying to blend two separate system together, which – while not impossible – will certainly be difficult and time consuming.

We are talking about revamping an existing system, which will need approval from the higher ups, game designers to actively troubleshoot said ideas, tooltip artist and typewriter to construct and document the changes, programmers attempting to bugproof (which won’t work flawlessly) before they make the changes, and bugfix after they’re done.

All of this will take time, resource and money, something they can’t probably afford right now with all the other changes and stuff they’ve got going on. The fact that this little change is fairly insignificant, and the effort to make this change outweigh the benefit by tenfold certainly doesn’t help.

There you have it.
Once again, I am by all means not a programmer, nor do i work for Anet, but this is probably the most probable reason I can think of coming from a game design/business point of view.

This analysis………………………..

If you have no expertise to make a conclusion.. you then have no right to even attempt to discuss that platform.. however, you didn’t just discuss it, you declared it the probable answer.

I AM a programmer.. It depends entirely on how they implemented their abstract for skills. If they’re half intelligent, it would be a pretty easy fix. All a skill should do is “Activate” and the events, despite whatever they may be, will follow from that command. All it would need is for activating the button to call the class that handles the animal AI and tell it to chomp.

This is of course assuming they are even the slightest tiniest bit intelligent.

However, I will claim that making such an adjustment alters the dynamic that I think they were going for. The valid point you did bring up at the very least is that such an adjustment is a huge adjustment, abstractly speaking. Not so much code-wise, just in the way a player perceives the dynamic between pet and player. They are going for a quasi relationship not direct control.

(Don’t think that means I agree btw, for a matter of fact in my opinion I think Anet ruined the ranger in GW2.. but I am biased having played ranger for 6 years in GW1)

garethh.3518:

…. makes me wonder again and again how GW1 came to be…

A large dose of random luck. It is evident through the things they’ve done in the balance and the things they’ve said historically that they have a minimal understanding of the features that made GW1 great, let alone the features that make every other competitive game even competitive.

Derailed thread is officially derailed.

Frankly, seeing how they designed the system themselves and splitting a skill would simplify balancing that skill, I find the argument hard to believe.

Certainly, he argued that balancing must be done delicately because it affects PvE and WvWvW… Which is true, but then they argue splitting would require greater testing. Which is technically false. If they split the skill, they would have more skills to test, but the testing would be reduced since they wouldn’t need to check the cross contamination between different realms.

No.

/15chars

Honestly, I would use the massive amounts of data they could potentially accumulate to and put it through some graph theory algorithms to obtain an approximate snapshot of the health of their balance. Then proceed to do updates to the balance and observer how that alters their snapshot. With this sort of thing they could do balances relatively often just for initial data collection on how they change from state to state.

After observing and analyzing, they could figure out how to properly balance their game.

Of course, this stuff only works with mass amounts of data, I am not sure if the PvP population counts as massive =P

DO YOU KNOW…

That sometimes restating a problem can increase its priority?

That we as the consumers do not have the burden of creation?

That perhaps it is the job of the creators to solve the problems inherent in their own designs, the problems that they, BY DEFINITION, made.

I got a solution for you. Merge PvP into the PvE. Sure it might be less competitive, but at least there would be updates

dejay.2598:

fox news has the highest viewer of any mainstream media though

prob cuz CNN is government controlled, msnbc is MY FEELINGS > YOUR OPINION, and ABC rather talk about cats

msnbc can’t even run news 24/7 their rating are so bad lel

not that fox news is any good though, Stossel is the only proper journalist on there

Republicans

O man, you completely disproved me with a single strategy. If only the game were so fun as to have just one strategy.

You’re right man, that sounds like the greatest game created.. With a model like that they must have millions of… hundreds of thousands of.. well.. a good number of dedicated players!

Would you prefer a logical argument as to why conquest is a bad game mode?

Keep in mind, my logical argument won’t involve caps unless I happen to be quoting you.

I suppose I should point out, this argument is only valid if you accept the same definition of what one would expect from a competitive game.

We can start by looking at the facts, GW2 was given the greatest opportunity of any game I have seen in a long time. The hype they generated was insane. How is it, that a game which held a $100,000 tournament nine months after they went live and wasn’t interested in e-sports has resulted to a $10,000 game almost a year after it went live while advertising e-sports?

Certainly, GW1 was never truly balanced.. It couldn’t have just been an aweful balance. GW1 did not have a pvp split, observer mode, pvp only characters or anything like that at release. It was more in alpha that GW2 could ever dream to have been. I would easily argue that -most- the mechanics from GW2 far surpass that from GW1.

So then why is it that this “competitive” gamemode has fallen short?

Could it be perhaps that Anet chose the game mode that has systematically failed in nearly every venue it has been attempted? That a gamemode that forces people to spread out and only rarely team fight was the one of choice? A gamemode where a truly team oriented combat was put on the backburner and only exists at the rare moment when you, for what ever strange reason, have a 5v5 at a single point?

Nope.. It can’t be any of that.. The millions of players who made GW1 what it was, millions of others who backed other competitive genres, the casual buyers.. it’s their fault. It’s the fault of the very people to whom they are appealing.

Let me run this scenerio by you. I worked Customer Service for 8 years. If everytime a stupid customer came in wanting me to fix something they did wrong, I told them you’re stupid, it’s your fault, my store would never have existed. When you are a company attempting to appeal your consumers, you should start by appealing to them.

Iono, I think that sounds pretty logical to me.

Conan.8046:

Wow is still the best. Guild wars is not a MMORPG.

Lololol

Lol.. you think you called kitten early?

The only people who didn’t already call all the bad things that happened to this game are the ones still playing it.

Get in line behind he millions who already told Anet not to do almost everything they’ve done.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Lost-potential/first

-Why not

I don’t intend for this to sound rude.. But that sounds absolutely awful.. So awful in fact, you should work for Anet

@gareth

I would argue that one game mode is important. And sure, you can turn conquest into a FUN game mode, conquest by definition won’t ever in any game of this genre be a even half mediocre game mode.

GW2 has one thing going for it. Excellent mechanics. I absolutely love the GW2 mechanics, many of them are brilliant. However, they dropped the ball on soooo much that to say one thing would fix everything is simply wrong. They could re-balance the game to have a better support, but it still wouldn’t be competitive because of conquest. And of course, changing it from conquest to anything else wouldn’t be sufficient either.

Frankly, they need a gamemode that promotes team play and they need roles that can actually interact within a team.

BTW.. while im on this rant, improving rewards won’t do kitten to improve competition. Just sayin, I think I see one post a week where everyone says “BETTER REWARDS PLEASE.” That should be the last thing on your list of improvements, give me a good game first.

@Andrew

Actually, I would argue you don’t need healers one bit. You do need a support however. In GW1 there was the prot and the redbar. All the redbar did was sit and watch the redbars on the side and watch players move for a spike (depending what type of team you were against.) The prot on the other hand had to make sure he was utilizing his skills properly. A great prot could carry a bad healer since well placed prot drastically reduced the energy consumed by almost every player in the backline and midline.

POINT BEING – The important thing is proper damage mitigation. Passive healing is always bad, you want something active. But all healing should be converted from a retroactive act to a proactive act and the management of the actual health should fall to the individual player (In this context of course).

So basically, you could keep most things the same if you shifted passive healing to active healing, improved the effectiveness of damage mitigation, improved the effectiveness of individual heals, fixed conditions, and shifted the notion of damage to act as an attrition factor as opposed to a death mechanic.

As the game plays out a health bar shouldn’t be spiked. Health should take on the role that energy did in past games and the downed state is the role that health once took. So at a quick glance, you can see just how both teams are doing in pressure. Then once someone is down you have to shift the game and play off of it (Just like in GW1 when a monk ran out of energy you had to react as a team quite quickly.)

IMO Remove random crit and add logical crit

Laxuar.3504:

Diage, you greatly explain the situation of GW, the problem is that the health can’t be a long term resources because it is your life, and when you finish it you are dead like other games. The problem is that there are toons of bunker build that simply can’t die or they take too much, but if you reduce the skill that allow them to stay alive they will die too fast, some for some dps build. With the energy you can introduce one more option to balance, that will bring more intelligent use of skills, and a stop for long and intensive fight.

Actually, if you run out of HP you don’t just die. You go into downed mode. That is an important point because in most games your hp is that last little defense between you and defeat. In this game, it is downed mode. Of course, the discussion of downed mode is nearly completely irrelevant.

Think of it like this right. In GW1 you had a monk in your backline and warriors in your frontline. The warriors seldom cared about their energy whereas the energy of the monks was insanely important. For a matter of fact, they bore nearly all the weight of the energy problem. I should qualify that, certainly eles had energy issues too, but within confines of a team if an ele ran out of energy it meant you’d receive more pressure or do less pressure. If a monk ran out of energy it generally meant a team wipe.

So despite the fact I wholeheartedly disagree with capture points, this is how it ought to play out in my mind.

Skill needs to be reintroduced into the game, that is definitely true. But you need not have energy for that. If it were possible that bunkers are MOSTLY incapable of fulling sustaining themselves but instead took slight pressure over time, you would see that their HP would be a good indicator of the amount of time he was in combat (as should be represented by any good long term resource.) This is assuming the person besieging him was competent enough to properly time his skills to maximize the effective pressure, not simply spam. Combine this with a slower pace of point gain and a greater reward for capping (for your team). And you just might start to see a game form where the concept is not to simply run blindly spamming, but rather to properly siege bunkers and set yourself up for success with appropriate timing of skill usage.

EDIT – Added: I want to also mention, I agree that the AN easy solution would be to implement energy as a long term resource, however that is a significant change to the game versus altering balance and adjusting point gain. It is also more creative and more interesting to attempt to design something which is far more unique.