Guild Wars 2

Hey all.

I’m sad to say that I’ll be leaving ArenaNet after 8 years with the company, and it’s been an amazing ride!

I’ve chatted with many of you on vent, we’ve debated on State of the game, we’ve tossed ideas back and forth on the forums, and I’ve met many of you in person at various cons!

It has been my privilege, pleasure and honor to work with such a passionate and intelligent group of fans. You guys have always kept me honest, you’ve pushed me to better myself, and your ideas have helped to create GW2’s success – we couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you for your love, passion and communication.

I will always look back on my time here with love and gratitude, and much of that is owed to you, our wonderful fans.

-Chap

Weclome to the Profession Balance sub-forum! Here’s a few things to keep in mind when posting on this forum:

• Make a good title. This will help us identify how you’re approaching something. Examples: “[PvP][Guardian] Omfgwtfbbq QQ. [PvE][Thief] Suggestions for stealth.[WvW]Why do I keep dying to supply Dolyaks? ”
• Be constructive. Discuss, don’t argue.* If you think a change may cause issues, say why and give examples. Try not to argue with others – make your point and then accept that other people may have different points of view.
• Give examples: I had 2000 toughness but still got hit by X target for roughly Y damage.
• Be concise. Our time is limited and we can’t read walls of text because it will prevent us from having the time to read as many posts as possible. Bullet points or numbered lists are very easy for us to read!
• Be specific. “I expect this change to accomplish A, but I think it will actually accomplish B”. The more specific you are, the better we are able to understand where you’re coming from, what type of content you play, and it helps us to understand the context for your feedback.
• Be objective. Keep in mind that just because you may not like something, that doesn’t make it bad. Others may have differing opinions. They may play a different type of content, or they may play a different profession, so be objective and keep in mind – we have to balance the game for EVERYONE, not just you.
• Be respectful. This goes for your fellow community members as well as for devs. Respect the ideas and opinions of others.
• Be mindful of scope. It takes design, development and testing time in order to make a new feature or revise an old one. Keep scope/work/time/resources in mind when you make your suggestions.
• Be mindful of context. Power creep is something we’re trying to avoid. Sometimes a profession may not receive as many increases as other classes. A lot of times, this is because that class is already performing very well in the current state of the game. So keep the overall context/state of the game in mind when giving feedback.

We want to hear for your feedback for balance in all areas of the game, and this sub-forum will help the balance team to gather your feedback so that we can collaborate more closely with the community when evaluating balance changes!

Thanks for posting your ideas!!

-Balance team

Warriors are pretty strong right now, but will be seeing changes in an upcoming patch.

We like how they can be tanky, and we like how they can do DPS if they want. We also like the CC they can bring. We just don’t like them doing it all with 1 build.

Just to confirm, we are working on new maps. I can’t give too many details, but a few things:

1) We’re trying maps with no cap points.
2) We’re trying mechanics that focus on high risk/reward mechanics that can win to sudden wins/sudden losses.
3) We’re trying maps that focus on “big play” moments that permanently impact the map flow/map status.
4) I can’t give an ETA on when you’d see one live, because we’re trying different maps, and each of them takes time to prototype, etc.

I think that conquest is easy for new players to get into, and it’s allowed for some amazing high-level games so far! But we’d like to try some new things that get away from conquest.

Also, as many of us have said, we want to give players enough variety such that they can change what they play from time to time, while also being sure that we don’t fracture the player-base by spreading players out to too many different game types.

I know this isn’t a super exhaustive answer, but just wanted to give you guys a quick update.

I once asked Evan if he could make some UI tweaks to our minimaps in PvP…he just looked at me, closed his eyes for 2 seconds, opened his eyes again and said, “It’s in”.

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills. Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types. This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games. As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

Chap’s woefully ill-conceived attempt at a metaphor on why we don’t spilt all skills off the bat: Imagine you’re in school, and in order to make sure you learn languages at an even pace, you have to split everything you do into 3 languages. For me, let’s say it’s English, Japanese and Latin (No, Greek, I liked learning Greek more than Latin). You start off answering a question on a test in 3 different languages. You rock. But then you do it more and more often. For every note you take in a lecture, you have to write it in 3 different languages. For every paper you write, you have to write it in 3 languages. For all homework, you have to do it in 3 languages. Every test. Every quiz. It may seem small at first, but if you’re not careful, you’re doing three times the work as normal.

Game types
So a lot of you want new game types. We’ve heard you. We’re prototyping more of them right now. But, as Colin said at the panel, we have to be careful. We learned a lot from GW1. We learned that having too many game types can split up the player base. But, if you’re not careful, just having 1 game type may not be enough variety. You’ve got to find that perfect spot.

Deathmatch. I like DM, but I’m much more interested in objective based DM. “Go in a room and kill a dude” was fun when I was playing Doom/Quake/Unreal, but even those, as simple games, still had map control and buff/armor control. Just giving two players the same guns/armors, putting them in a room, and saying “Ok go” just isn’t as fun to play. Those other elements add a lot to the game. The most competitive/successful games in recent history all share these “secondary” objectives as well (they aren’t STRICTLY Deathmatch):

• In CS, that was the bomb/hostages. CoD (and similar games) still retain similar objectives to this day. Killing your opponent is still integral, but the secondary objectives “force” action.
• In RTS, it’s the resources (micro arena is fun, but it’s not nearly as fun to play or watch as having to also manage resources/scout/build the right tech, etc.). The resources force action.
• In Mobas, it’s all about controlling lanes, pushing towers, and controlling the jungle. It’s not just “go in a room and shoot a dude with your skills”. That’s fun, but I think the other elements add more strategy and tactics to the game, and make them more fun to play.

So for us, when we’re designing game types, we’re thinking about these things. DM is still a fun and exciting part of conquest, but I know you guys want more – we’re working on it.

Balance
So during the shoutcast, Grouch and I kept joking about the “petting zoo”. It was funny. A lot of people laughed. But in the back of my mind, I knew we already had some balance changes coming to address it (you’ll see those tomorrow). My mentality was: let’s just have fun, and make it as enjoyable as possible for the viewers. I’ve seen posts saying we like that style of play, we want to have tons of AI builds in the meta, and we don’t care at all about balance or how the game looks/plays. I’ve seen posts stating that I think the petting zoo is funny and that we want nothing but AI driven-builds to be played in the meta (or some other crazy stuff). That’s simply untrue.

So the Ranger will be seeing some changes to the spirit build. We’re being very mindful to carefully shave it so that:

1. We don’t hurt other areas of the game where the build may not be a problem, as it is in PvP, and
2. We’ve already seen counters to this build showing up (there’s a thread talking about the Warrior countering this build, and to what degree) in the meta.

So, we will be “shaving” the build a little (we don’t want to over-correct the issue) and seeing how the meta adapts.

Here are some other things we keep in mind as we’re balancing things:

Perception of balance. Perception (there’s that pesky word again) of balance is very important. The last major update saw the Warrior getting some tools that we, the balance team, perceived to be enough to warrant their inclusion in the current meta. At first, a lot of people felt they still weren’t good enough. But now, with no other balance work, people are starting to figure out that the Warrior DOES have the tools to help a team, even in a heavy condition meta. The perception of the Warrior changed. This is why we try not to “whack a mole” balance – we like to give you guys time for your perceptions to mature in any given meta, rather than over balancing the game. Are we perfect? Hell no. We try our best to predict where our changes will take the metagame, and then let you guys flow with the game as the meta evolves.

“Bad for the player, but good for the game”. Alright. Story time. The game dev community is a pretty small place, and a lot of devs know one another. We are lucky enough to have game nights with guys from WOTC (they make Magic:TG) and I got into a great conversation with one of their devs. I was talking about balancing an MMO vs a CCG, and we were swapping lessons/ideas back and forth on the things we’ve learned. I asked him about the mana system, mulligans, and how much I hated them as a player. I hate winning because my opponent mulligans, and I hate losing because of them. I asked him what he thought about that. His answer, in a word, was amazing. He said (paraphrasing), “Ya, that random sucks. Mulligans, mana floods (getting too much mana, but not enough “action” cards) and mana screws (not getting enough mana) all suck. But they add this element where anyone has a shot in any game. Basically, those things are bad for the player, but they’re good for the game.” I thought it was a great way of summing up what happens when we, as devs, have to balance various classes in an MMO. It may suck to have YOUR build and YOUR class slightly brought down in power, but, here’s the thing, it’s good for the game at large. So don’t think that we hate X class. We love all the classes. But sometimes we need to adjust a few things in order to protect the health of the overall game.

Shaving vs Whack a mole. We want to “shave” as much as possible, and not do massive improvements/reductions to classes. This means making slight tweaks to classes, rather than massive changes which can upset the balance of the game. A lot of times we use spreadsheets, generate the baselines for a given type of skill, and then bring the outliers up or down, depending on where they hit. Sometimes very slight tweaks can have massive implications.

“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.” -Soren Kierkegaard

Sup! + Pax
Thanks to everyone who was able to make it to the Pax finals!! It was a blast and getting to meet both of the teams (and a ton of other players) was really fun! It was a lot of work, but the program went pretty well overall. Sorry to both of the teams about the tech issues we were having/sound issues. Those things happen, but I’m still sorry about them.

There’s been a lot of…”fire/passion” on the forums lately so I wanted to take some time to address some things. As I’ve stated before, we’re usually really busy trying to get things (like Pax) to happen, but we love to post when we’re able. We read MOST of what’s on the forums, but we seldom have time to reply to each individual thread.

So, I thought I’d try something. I’m gonna try to address a multitude of issues that have been raised on the forums in this post, rather than responding to each of the threads individually. As you can imagine, it’s much easier to respond to everything in one post/thread, rather than trying to keep up with multiple threads.

I’ll break it up into sections so it’s easier to read, as walls of text have a habit of not being very reader friendly.

LESSGO!

For the love of the game
Some have said that we (the devs) just don’t care about the game. This, I can tell you, could not be further from the truth. We LOVE this game like crazy. You guys may be frustrated that a feature isn’t in, or that something’s not perfect, but it DRIVES US NUTS. It keeps us up at night. We wake up thinking about them and writing “to do” lists in our heads as we drive to work every day.

Unfortunately we can’t just snap our fingers and fix everything. We have to take all known issues, prioritize them, and then start dealing with them an issue at a time. That process looks something like this: we do a design of the feature, requisite resources are requested, the feature is implemented, iterated upon, tested, polished, and then released. For a game the size of an MMO, these things take time. We’re not a small game that can move/change/adapt quickly. An MMO is more like a massive ship – it takes time to change direction. Many systems/pieces/features in the game also impact one another, so we have to be very careful in what we change and how.

We’re very passionate about the game, and we want it to be the best game possible. We love the players and we love the game. Just because you don’t get what you want, right when you want it, doesn’t mean we don’t care. We’re just very busy doing a LOT of things, because a TON has to happen behind the scenes to get an MMO built and updated.

Sometimes it may seem like we aren’t listening, or we don’t respond to your posts. But a TON of things could be at work. Don’t assume that just because we don’t change things exactly when you want them changed that we’re ignoring you or don’t care about your opinions and thoughts.

We aren’t Data
We get tired. Emotional. Fatigued. Excited. You name it. Ask any dev from any game, and they’ll tell you – they’ve been through it all in order to ship a game. And just like you (who are also not robots), we take vacations. We hit caps where we’re just so tired that we need to back off, recharge, take a vacation, and then come back to the project.

We have tough skin when it comes to taking criticism, but an overabundance of negativity on the forums can still take a toll on anyone. This is simply natural. It’s the same for the president (who I’m sure hears a TON of opinions about how he’s doing his job), any athlete who plays in the public eye, any artist, any performer. You want criticism so that you can improve, but you also have to develop a tough skin so that negative feedback doesn’t keep you from being functional. Sometimes this means you take a break from negative sources of feedback.

The Pax event took a TON of time/planning/prep from many people, and due to that, a lot of us are taking slight breaks right now. If you don’t see as much activity on the forums for a bit, that’s why!

We also think that we need to improve the PvP rewards. I can’t give too many details (sorry to say that so often guys), but this is something that’s already in the plans.

So you guys know, we already split some skills. And, what’s most pertinent to the current thread, we plan to do this even more.

When we first shipped, it was awesome to have a lot of the balance be the same between PvE/WvW/PvP. But, as you guys have really started to push the game types to their limits, classes and specs that work in one areas of the game are sometimes ineffectual in others.

Due to this, we’ll have to do more splitting of skills to better balance the various areas of the game.

TL:DR – We already do this, and we’ll be using it even more in order to balance the different areas of the game effectively.