Guild Wars 2

I told to my team in the first day, when paid tournaments opened, that it would kill the game. I gave it an estimate of 2 weeks until it would cause no paid tournaments to open up and unfortunately it seems that I was quite correct as today we were no longer able to join paid tournaments as they just won’t start. It’s been exactly 14 days since they opened up.

There are no sane people who would want to grind 5 free tournament wins only to be crushed by superior teams in the first round of paid tournament. That’s 4 hours if you win every free tournament match, for 10 min wait and getting crushed in less than 10 minutes. You can’t join alone for free tournaments as you would only get crushed by premades. There’s no reason to play free tournaments as a team when crushing PUGs just ain’t fun and tournament tickets are basically useless unless you are already good enough to do well in paid tournaments. SPvP with its 8v8 zerg trains aren’t fun either.

We have so few people left playing that matchmaking probably won’t help. Unless some miracle happens in the 15th patch, this game is dead and buried, but I wouldn’t count on it. Which is a shame as the game itself had a lot of potential.

tOss.9024:

If you don’t think it causes imbalance, then you shouldn’t have to switch unless you want to. Implying people have to switch to perform well also implies imbalance. If a team runs a group of balanced builds, then they can counter a team switching between two extremes.
Build swapping can be viable, but not necessary, and once the meta game shifts I think more will realize this.
As with any competitive game, there will be trends of “Must dos.” This is just another trend if the moment imo.
I wouldn’t doubt you will see non-switching, fast moving, teams that take advantage of the down time needed to run a switch game At some time should switching become extremely common.

The fastest team is going to be the one that abuses the most out of weapon swaps. For example: hammer guardian giving himself swiftness with staff and swapping to greatsword to do a leap, swapping to sword and teleporting towards enemy and swapping back to his hammer. Its only going to get worse once players start understanding the game better.

I think a buff in the starting area that makes you invulnerable, unable to use any skills, but able to swap items/skills would be the best solution. That way you would have to carry the consequences of your build (bringing swiftness makes you stuck with the weapon that has it, etc), while still allowing mid game changes if your team gets completely countered.

Obviously mid game class changes need to be prevented also.

Dariroch.6482:

If you are skilled and know enough about the classes you’re fighting to find a suitable counter to it in your weapon sets/ trait skills mid match I think you should be able to adjust to fix it.

There’s nothing skillful in being able to swap weapons, even a monkey could be trained to do it. At the moment no one probably knows the correct choices in every situation, but if we think one year forward, every decent player is going to be swapping weapons and amulets like hell, which isn’t going to be much fun for anyone.

Here’s some more examples for swapping:
Guardian swaps staff in and blocks a pathway to capture point for 5 seconds and swaps back to his main weapon before going into combat.

Ranger gives 15s fury (+swiftness +might) to his with warhorn before swapping to his normal weaponset just before combat.

A lot of classes have a trait with 90s cd that does something when your character gets disabled, Shared Anquish for ranger(III, wilderness survival) as an example that prevents a single disable from hitting you. After you have used that cooldown, just swap another trait in until it comes back up.

Superior runes of Grove have 180s cd in (6) ability to root someone hitting you. Swap in another armor set with different runes after first fight!

Your super tanky guardian just lost a point to another super tanky guardian? Swap in greatsword and Berserker amulet and go kick his butt with a friend. After you get the point, swap in hammer, mace and soldier neck and you are again the tankiest thing the game has ever seen.

See a necromancer coming your way? Swap utilities (and possibly traits if possible) for condition removal and take knight’s amulet.

Macro Wars 2?

Hsulf.9370:

My cure to the suggestion:

Make it so you can change utilities, weapons and traits at spawn points. Meaning if you go out and die at point X, you can put on your soldiers amulet, weapon swap, more condition cleansers for the next fight whatever it may be, not giving yourself complete flexibility 24/7 but only when you die.

Might as well make it so that you can’t use abilities in the spawn points, to prevent getting swiftness and swapping to your normal weapon. Would also remove the chore of having to combofield stack all possible buffs in the spawn point at the same time. I’d be totally fine with that.

I’m with Aragiel here, having no swaps results in forcing more tactical decisions teamplay wise, which are much harder to do than simple equipment/skills swaps. It is also something spectators can see, while they probably won’t be able to see amulet swaps. Besides swapping stuff midgame just ain’t fun, which should be the main reason for anyone to play this game.

GonzoNeo.4965:

Totally dissapointed

Only things that we alredy knew, the only new info is about the rewards.

-No word about balance
-No word about new maps

And most important, no word about new modes.

Uhm, LoL, Hon DotA(1/2) have only one gamemode and only one map and they are played more than any other other e-sports currently. Starcraft basically has only one competetive game mode and the game still lived after over 10 years only to be replaced by stacraft 2. I don’t need 10 zillion different game modes, I just need one that is good.

The only thing that I find disappointing in that blog post is the fact that it is only words, it is taking way too long for them to roll any features in. They could at least change the map rotation so that there would be a slight chance to meet a decent team in some other map than Kyhlo.

Words are wind and it seems to be blowing in Arena.Net headquarters.