Guild Wars 2

• Arenanet’s admission of wrongdoing, and refusal to revert. This is an outstanding issue that became writ large in the series of patches stretching from September 2013 to December 2013, but really started with the Dhuumfire/Aetherblade patch.
  • As an example, take the rework of Diamond Skin for Elementalist into a condition immunity. This was a change widely protested by the community, yet was implemented anyway. The change accompanied severe nerfs to active condition cleansing in Water Magic to be replaced by a passive trait with hard counter gameplay. No proposals are on the way to revert this change.
  • Subsequent changes, including those outlined in the February 18 Ready Up show, do not propose reversions of previous changes and instead introduce new changes like Evade frames on Burning Speed for Elementalist, or an 8% shave instead of a full revert of Healing Signet for Warrior, or making Dhuumfire proc on Life Blast – yet leaving the Bleed and other Condition application nerfs for Necromancer intact, or alterations to Deceptive Evasion that affect all Mesmer builds instead of directly nerfing Clone Death traits out of hand.
  • All of these changes reflect a lack of root cause analysis in determining sources of problems – whilst introducing new potential problems by simultaneously altering other mechanics. If you make a mistake, you undo its damage rather than try to do something else entirely. This is not what is happening.
  • An admission of wrongdoing along with a refusal to revert should by all counts, be socially unacceptable, if not rationally inadvisable in the context of balance. This is an attitude and point of pride that Arenanet needs to eliminate if it is to regain community trust.

• Certain balance changes are being coupled to Feature patches whilst the meta stagnates
  • The most obvious examples here are the Healing Signet 8% nerf along with the bug fix to Spirit of Nature to alter healing from 480 to 320 as stated on the tooltip. Both of these changes are to be coupled to the March Feature patch – the same patch which will introduce double Sigils to two handed weapons and remove the GCD of dissimilar Sigil procs, along with a rework of many Rune sets.
  • It should be obvious to outside observers that this coupling will not only delay much needed balance affecting bug fixes, but will also muddle the balance picture. The effects on the meta of the Healing Signet and Spirit of Nature changes will be lost in the wake of the Rune and Sigil changes. Arenanet not only does its balance team a dis-service by making their jobs harder, but also fosters frustration by acknowledging an issue, yet dithering upon fixing it.

What can be done:
What can and should be done is simple. I’ve stated the same at the beginning. Change the attitude that pervades Arenanet’s current project management.

• Decouple Balance changes and bug fixes from Feature patches. Dhuumfire/Aetherblades was a lesson that should have been learnt, yet March 2014 aims to repeat the same mistake.

• Iterate on balance more frequently. You know those fortnightly Living Story content patches? Why is balance iteration not of the same pace when database coding should, by all rights, be less labour and wage intensive than content creation? The GDC presentation I linked at the beginning demonstrates that Arenanet prides itself as a “programmer’s” company, that their coders were their backbone. It would seem the other way around at this point, with art and content teams outperforming their erstwhile colleagues by leaps and bounds.

• With more frequent balance iteration, balance can be achieved faster. Make a mistake? It’s fine, there’s only going to be a fortnight of abuse. Right now, players in all 3 areas of PvE, PvP and WvW languish in the wake of the balance errors following Dhuumfire/Aetherblades – nigh on 7 months ago. This is an unacceptable pace of change in any industry, let alone a digital one where agility in development and iteration has been market demonstrated and market proved to be superior in outcome.

• Let the community test the changes instead of testing internally for months and releasing a disconnected series of changes. The current stance reflects an astonishing lack of agility and is reminiscent of developer attitudes in the 90’s where development of software was similarly inflexible.

• Admissions of wrongdoing should be accompanied with reversions, not ancillary changes. A lack of willingness to revert casts community doubt on the competence of the balance team and introduces the potential to cause new problems in the future. Working in healthcare, to give an example: Doctors don’t prescribe a medication, then prescribe 3 more to treat the side effects – they withdraw the problem medication and use another. A similar stance should – and must – be taken.

Balance and build diversity:

Overall, build diversity in GW2 has been severely curtailed by the fact that entire lines of Utility skills and Traits have been underwhelming – yet balance has focused almost exclusively on the rare few “meta” builds and skills. This often comes to the detriment of multiple skills and Utilities. Arenanet’s insistence on “letting the meta settle” has resulted in patches coming every few months that iterate on balance – yet the changes within reflect an increasing disconnect of balance intention and balance result.

Community Frustration and perception

The lack of iteration has bred community frustration and resentment towards Arenanet who feel that the pace of development is glacial. Features like PVP Leagues, new game modes and even basic features that have been promised for nigh on a year are only just now coming “over the horizon”.

In terms of balance, builds relying upon a confluence of traits and procs that emphasise great reward with little risk dominate the field – Healing Signet/Cleansing Ire Hambow Warrior, Decap (CC bunker) engineer, Spirit Ranger, Minion Master Necromancer – these are all builds that put the burden of skill upon the defender – overwhelmingly so – that “off-meta” or inferior builds with higher risk-reward ratios have to struggle to survive and yet contribute less to the outcome. The state of the game has teetered upon the brink since the introduction of the Dhuumfire/Aetherblade feature patch and despite a multitude of changes since, the same builds are still dominating and team compositions are looking increasingly similar – Bunker Guardian, Soldier’s Hambow Warrior +/- another Warrior, Thief, Spirit Ranger, (option of) Decap or Condition Bomb/Nade Engineer or Necromancer.

This is not to say that such builds should not exist, but balance should be in such a way that more builds than those listed above can have a place in a team composition without those builds shutting out others to the point of exclusion.

For PVE, the so-called “Damage, Support, Control” alternative trinity so trumpeted as the innovation over the “Tank, Healer, DPS” trinity has dissipated in favour of “DPS, DPS, DPS”.

Defiance has stripped the Control archetype of its teeth, whilst providing no reward for controlling Boss mobs.

Slow, extremely hard hitting attacks have negated the need for Support – there is little need to support allies with healing if taking a hit means almost certain death. DPS with just enough Support through Boons has become the one true god and PvE encounters have devolved into a “stack mobs, cleave to death” DPS race over thoughtful, deliberate challenges that tax a group’s ability to co-ordinate and problem solve.

Finally, there also exists the issue of balancing errors, and bugs affecting balance being unaddressed for significant periods. A few examples:

• Sigil of Paralysation was found to prolong Fear and Stun duration by a full second as opposed to the intended 15% extension. The bug was found, reported and admitted to be an issue soon after the Dhuumfire patch, yet remained unfixed until soon after the PAX Tournament. In the mean time, Terror Necromancers and CC Warriors exploited the Sigil for months.

This is a topic that I’ve been debating with myself whether to open or not for the longest time. I feel that it’s important to bring this up because it strikes at the heart of one of the flaws of GW2’s product life cycle – project management. But for those that will TL;DR, the basic argument is this:
Balance is about iteration, and Arenanet is not iterating fast enough
Fundamental profession, PvP, PvE and WvW bugs and problems remain unaddressed in lieu of fortnightly content updates

I will touch on a few key points:

1. A preamble
2. Some problems remain unfixed
3. New content is pushed in lieu of iteration and polish
4. Community perception of paralysis and disconnect
5. Community frustration and responses
6. What can be done to address the issue

I was finally pushed to make this topic when I saw Cameron Dunn’s GDC lecture discussing Guild Wars 2’s server infrastructure – and what is possible using Guild Wars 2’s Duo system to iterate on the game. Click the quick-link to the “Iterate” bookmark or skip to 35:47 timestamp if you don’t want to spare the 45 minutes to learn about Arenanet’s amazing infrastructure and their metrics that they like to talk about. This thread is also instructive and discusses why more frequent iteration is essential for balance

I want to bring this up because the game is now well over a year past its launch. Despite teething problems, GW2’s launch was one of the smoothest I have ever played through and it is a great game at heart. The trouble is, well over a year past its launch, some of its teething problems are still writ large. Despite fortnightly Living Story releases to support the game, fundamental profession issues and bugs remain unfixed; while community response to Feature patches that include sweeping Balance Changes has not been actioned for months – often until the next Feature patch.

This is a bad trend and it needs to stop.

Arenanet has coded this groundbreaking infrastructure and it is being squandered on providing temporary content instead of fixing and polishing and iterating on their game. This kind of project management has lead to dozens of threads of negativity and more than a few veteran players quitting the game. In some cases, whole teams. Team Paradigm (recently started playing again), Absolute Legends (disbanded), Made in Meta, to name just a few.

Preamble over. Onto persistent problems and QoL issues that remain unaddressed.

On the various forums one can find dozens of threads, often pertaining to – and addressing and re-addressing – the same issues, over and over. This is a problem, because it leads to a community perception of paralysis, which causes:

1. A perception of neglect
2. Accumulation of negative PR
3. A perception of broken promises

As an example, here are a few outstanding issues on PvP:
Leaderboards and/or leagues. Leaderboards were released somewhat buggy, whilst promises for Ladders and Leagues stretch back a few years

• Leaderboards
• All is vain
• A stale (condition) meta
• Glicko 2 flaws (a review of the current flaws of the GW2 Glicko 2 implementation and leaderboards
• Lack of iteration on PVP

• Matchmaking remains hit-and-miss for some. 4V5 and being teamed together with new players has been a source for considerable angst.