Guild Wars 2

Come on guys, lets be more productive here. Saying we don’t care isn’t just wrong, it shuts down and discourages dialog between developers and players.

Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly express your opinions and frustrations, but just because we are heading in a direction you personally don’t agree with doesn’t mean we don’t care or that we are ignoring you.

Now lets get this thread back on track.

As Roy mentioned in another thread, all the current traits will remain unlocked in PvP, even for new players. It is only new traits that need to be unlocked, and you will not have to PvE to obtain them.

Also, this system is designed for horizontal progression. Unlocking traits, or what have you, won’t (at least shouldn’t, barring any balance issues) make you more powerful, they simply give you a wider range of builds and allow you to better tune your character to your play style. Many, many successful games ease players into options, and, in my opinion, trait unlocking isn’t any different.

I understand some of you are worried that we’re just adding stuff and ignoring existing problems. I can assure you, as I sit within earshot of the Skills and Combat team, that they are very aware of this and have no plans to ignore existing issues.

Xista.7391:

So Justin just confirmed that sPvP will be vertical progression. You need to unlock abilities. I’m sorry, but unlocking new traits = vertical progression to me.

I have to disagree. If it meant more skills available to you at one time while you are playing, then yes it would be vertical, but that just isn’t the case. You get more trait choices, not more traits applied to your character.

Guts.4967:

It’s quite easy in fact…

Actually, it’s not easy. If it were, I can guarantee you that I would have already implemented it myself. We LOVE easy changes that improve quality of life for our players. (Maximum payoff for minimum effort. :P)

This is definitely something we want to do, but it’s at a lower priority than what we are currently working on. I know that isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s how we have to approach these sort of things.

You guys are making some really good points, thanks.

Do you guys think this should be a higher priority than other changes? Why?

I’d definitely like to see more things to do in the lobby, and I love jumping puzzles.

What other sorts of things would you guys like to see?

Hey guys. I really like some the ideas in here. Some of you definitely got us talking about how to make things smoother.

I’ve got this thread bookmarked so I can come back to it.

One thing I would suggest you keep in mind is that some of our users don’t even lift, and will troll any system that can hurt others.

Simplicity.7208:

True, I haven’t. But they’re pretty weak to conditions and can’t usually bunker a point plus they have a high skill-cap so most people who play them play them poorly. Combine that with a condition/bunker meta and you have a recipe for a net team loss.

I think you misunderstood. I love Mesmer, but I suck at Mesmer. -1 may be insufficient when I’m playing.

Nineaxis.1826:

snip.

Please do not presume to speak for all players. As a PvP player, I disagree with you, and I know others that do as well.

If you want to turns this into a numbers game, please do keep in mind that the vast majority of PvP players play PvE and WvW as well. We definitely want to make the game fun and enjoyable for PvP-only players as well, but we need to keep a broader context when designing systems.

evildeadjunky.1576:

Maybe cause its stupid that you have to load like 3 screens to do it?

You can directly join a custom arena from anywhere. You do not need to be in the Heart of the Mists anymore.

Xista.7391:

But lets say I wanted to play my friend’s spec, because it’s really good. But I can’t, because I don’t have certain traits unlocked. That to me feels really bad.

This exact scenario is on our radar, and we definitely want to make it possible. Hopefully you’ll get a better idea of what we have in mind when we talk about the new rewards system.

Just wanted a throw out a shout to Allie. She was just now laying the smack down regarding warriors being an issue.

#allieisourchampion

Evan and I got together and took another look at the data and have decided on some matchmaking changes.

We’re upping the minimum potentials filter setting from ‘1’ to ‘20’. This means the queue will have you wait when customizing a match for you until we have 20 or more potential player matches. We had this previously set to 1 to have matches start as quickly as possible.

We’re increasing the penalty for roster (read: party) size distance from ‘-100’ to ‘-500’. This means parties of different sizes are less likely to be matched.

We’re decreasing the penalty for ratings distance from ‘-25’ to ‘-5’. We found matches were already really close together and felt this penalty was too strict.

We’re increasing the penalty for duplicate professions from ‘-200’ to ‘-500’, and increasing the bonus for playing a unique (read: only one on team) from ‘100’ to ‘500’. Hopefully this will reduce the number of duplicate professions seen.

As always, let me know how this plays and if you can feel a difference.

Thanks.

Confirm progression has been disabled.

Olvendred.3027:

Then why make a distinction? If PvP can happily go along with players getting 12/13 traits per line, why add an extra layer of frustration and difficulty instead of giving them 13/13 traits per line? It’s obviously nothing to do with easing new players in.

If it were only an additional trait, you’d more of a have a point, but we’re introducing this system with the future in mind. I can’t speak for the Skills and Combat teams long turn plans, but I know I would be disappointed if we stopped with just these new traits.

Olvendred.3027:

Horizontal progression is a nice concept… but it’s one that I’ve never seen mentioned on the PvP forums, only the PvE ones. If you want to get more players in to PvP, somehow I don’t think keeping back build options is the way to go about it.

Horizontal progression is very common, even in PvP games. Personally, I think one of the reason’s PvP rewards seem somewhat hollow is that we have no real progression beyond looks. I think you would be hard pressed (outside one-off games like most FPS and RTSs) to find a successful game without progression. As a PvP player, I love this change (disclaimer: I had no design input) and can’t wait for the 15th.

uberkingkong.8041:

Where are all the good players at yo?

Define good? Your rating is average, so you should be getting matched with the average player.

As an altoholic, I feel your pain. I’ll need to take a look at the data tomorrow, find out just how common re-rolling is for PvPers.

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

I really feel particle effects being over the top are holding back viewers.

Many of us have the same opinion, though I’m not sure which team has that as a work item, and at what priority.

Rubik.7192:

PvP gives us a tiny bit of coin. No matter how much you play pvp, you won’t be able to make as much as your average pveer. What’s the point in implementing “horizontal” progression when pveers can unlock the new traits multiple times faster than pvpers?

That is a valid concern, one worthy of its own thread. I should mention that this is only part of the rewards we have planned. We should have a blog post about that coming out soon™, but I’m not sure where it is in the schedule.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

justin, could you confirm with us, that the newly unlocked traits would be account bound, once unlocked? because this is how it works for guild wars 1, once unlocked, is account wide. i expect the same in guild wars 2.

I don’t know, but I’ll bug Josh and Allie about it and see if they can get it answered on Ready Up tomorrow.

Simplest answer I can give is that it just isn’t as high a priority as other things we have been working on.

Why do you feel custom arenas do not work for those that want to duel?

Lupanic.6502:

You really think if a new player is able to select from a pool of traits he is fine but if he gets 1 new trait per line he is lost? Come on.

Again, this system is forward looking. If we just unlocked the 40 new traits now, what about next time? It will always just be X more. We have to draw a line somewhere, and here is probably the best place to start.

You do know we have multiple teams working on all aspects of the game concurrently, right? You can’t compare the output of one team to the sum of all output from every other team.

I mean, I’m good but I’m not that good.

Sure, it would be nice if we had more bodies working on PvP. That wouldn’t really get things to you faster, but could increase the number of things we’re getting to you.

The balance changes are being done by the Skills and Combat team. The rewards are being done by the PvP team.

I believe we are getting close to revealing more details about the reward changes, but I’m not certain about when that will be.

The solo arena roster shuffling should be in the next update (11/12) unless we find a critical bug and have to back out the change. This change should eliminate the sync queuing, and do a great deal toward preventing lopsided matchups.

More significant changes to matchmaking will come sometime next year, and I’ve already been told I can write-up a blog post and start a conversation with you guys, so keep an eye out for that.

This was related to the bug that was disabling progression on our arenas. Now that it is fixed, people should be directed to our custom arenas.

This was my fault, I made a typo on one of the map identifiers in our configuration files and the server didn’t recognize it as a standard configuration.

It should be working now.

sorrow.2364:

Is there at least a way to obtain those traits without spending money in PvP? For instance, back in GW1, you were able to unlock skills with factions, whose main purpose was that.

It would be great to allow players in the new reward system to be able to unlock those traits without paying gold, which can be spent in a lot of other ways (and trait isn’t exactly the way I want to spend golds on).

It could be, for instance, by paying tournament win tokens to a vendor?

I know it’s something we were discussing when we were talking about the new reward system, but I do not recall were we landed. I will bring it up with the team again. I know I’d like to see it.

Lord Kuru.3685:

No. If you have more options than your opponent, then you are potentially more powerful because at worst you can have the same build as him.

That isn’t the worst case scenario, you could just as well have an inferior build because you chose options that don’t work well together or with your play style. More options make coming up with good builds increasingly difficult, especially for beginners, because there are so many more things to consider and each must be weighed against alternative choices (opportunity cost.)

Lord Kuru.3685:

Plus, “barring any balance issues” is actually a big deal. You can bet these will cause balance issues (unless they’re intentionally bad like the new healing skills).

Definitely a concern, but that will mean little to new players who don’t know the current state of balance anyways.

We’ve added 50 more standard custom arenas. I’ve also randomized the map order.

Weapon rarity has no affect on stats in structured PvP.

We removed glory and match reward chests early to prevent a flood of PvE players from coming into PvP just to fill their wardrobe. While the our team would LOVE everyone playing PvP, some super smart economist peopleguys said it would have negative repercussions on the in-game economy or something.

It’s really unfortunate that we had to do this, but we explored other ways of handling it and nothing was really feasible except holding wardrobe back until the next feature pack (which also meant holding back lots of other PvP changes) or removing some of the PvP rewards for a month.

Edit: Tune in this Friday for news about the next phase of the new reward system.

Matchmaking has not changed. We stopped showing ranks because they were being used incorrectly (as if they implied skill rather than time invested), causing a toxic environment where players felt justified (wrongly) while harassing each other.

We are working on changes to matchmaking, but those changes are unrelated to the decision to not show ranks.

That said, there has been a huge influx of new players, and this is likely what you are noticing. They are likely going to need some time to learn the ropes and figure out how to play. May I suggest taking a patient, mentoring approach?

Mindtrick.5190:

Lol holidays are for college kids, most adults worked. People who need breaks from work don’t really love what they do. “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath then you will be succesful”.

My employer is very generous when it comes to paid holiday leave. I’ll also remind you that it’s a Sunday and I’m here looking at data and answering questions.

uberkingkong.8041:

…

We’re doing this because even though I consider myself perfect and incapable of writing bugs, I don’t have much empirical evidence to back that up.

On the off chance I messed up, it’s better that other people don’t get punished for it.

I really like this idea! Just sent an email to the team about it.

If we did remove ranks, we would probably give our players something to show off their achievement.

Farming not withstanding, we understand that many of our players have done a lot and we would never intentionally do anything to undermine that.

I’ll just leave these here…

• Anchoring or focalism The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information that we acquire on that subject)
• Availability heuristic The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
• Availability cascade A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
• Base rate fallacy or base rate neglect The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).
• Clustering illusion The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
• Confirmation bias The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
• Conjunction fallacy The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
• Conservatism or regressive bias A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.
• Conservatism (Bayesian) The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
• Curse of knowledge When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
• Focusing effect The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.
• Negativity bias Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

One’s I’ve noticed myself being guilty of from time to time, probably not a complete list…

• Clustering illusion The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
• Confirmation bias The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
• Curse of knowledge When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
• Empathy gap The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
• Hindsight bias Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.
• Identifiable victim effect The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.
• Illusion of validity Belief that furtherly acquired information generates additional relevant data for predictions, even when it evidently does not.
• Information bias The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
• Optimism bias The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).

Personally, I think we can get there.

It’s awesome that each day I get to help move things a little bit closer to that goal than the day before.

^__________________^

You just helped me find the bug!

Edit: Sorry, that was a bit unprofessional. I’ve just been trying to track it down for days.

Everyone’s MMR was just reset. In the eyes of the matchmaker, you’re all newbies now.

laokoko.7403:

Is it in game already? Or it havn’t be patched in yet.

In game, but currently disabled.

Morwath.9817:

-3 on leaderboard, enjoy
even if you get 1 sec DC due to GW2 client badness

It’s -1 to -3 depending on your odds of victory.

Morwath.9817:

the best way to avoid ‘build wars’ would be to hide display whos in enemy team before it starts, so you could just adjust your own setup by picking synergies in your team and counter class stacking. If you hide whos in enemy team, people won’t be able to pick ‘counters’ and ‘build wars’ won’t happen.

I really like this idea, passing it along to the team.

MystikaLsmuRF.7150:

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots…

I’ll have to go take a look at the code and see how we were able to filter them out. ;D

If you run into an especially frustrating match, shoot me a PM with the datacenter & time and I’ll take a look.

This should be fixed in the next PvP drop, which may be next month, not sure.

We’ve got even more substantial matchmaking improvements on the radar, but those won’t make it in until sometime next year.

Sorry for the trolls. :\

This shouldn’t be an issue after the next SPvP release.