Guild Wars 2

Sensotix.4106:

Reesha.7901:

Allie Murdock.8152:

The patch has been out for 2 days. There were so many changes that we really need to let things settle and let people find their way. Big balance changes like this shake things up a lot, and nobody can know how the community will adapt to the change until they adapt to the change, which usually takes longer than a couple days.

Maybe this is a bad place to post a suggestion, as I am not an experienced tournament player. ^^

I think it would be rather awesome if the top teams could test balance changes. A custom arena maybe, where those teams could play matches against one another, before the changes went live.

That way, feedback from experienced players could be handed directly to the developers. Balance would be tested by experienced players, and the rest of us would still have the option to voice our opinions afterwards to cower anything not discovered through testing.

I am sure I am not the first to think of this

i agree 100% !

If you reference my first post, you will see that I have a bit in there:

“All of this doesn’t matter though, if the 4%-10% spends little to no time giving us feedback for one reason or another (inactive, don’t care, think we don’t listen even if that’s wrong, etc.).”

Most of the 10% has direct access to the developers already. Some take advantage of it, most do not. We can’t control whether or not they give us feedback, but we definitely give them ample opportunity to do so.

The patch has been out for 2 days. There were so many changes that we really need to let things settle and let people find their way. Big balance changes like this shake things up a lot, and nobody can know how the community will adapt to the change until they adapt to the change, which usually takes longer than a couple days.

Any feedback on the changes at this point is knee-jerk, because there simply has not been enough time to gauge how things will be until it settles.

There is no single part of our player base that we should or do listen to more than the other. Every player has equal opportunity to say how they feel, and the “4%-10%” is not excluded in that. What we “listen” to is reason and objective feedback.

Do note though, what we listen to != what we implement (at least not right away). We read your suggestions all the time, but sometimes those suggestions are not in line with the pillars of our game. Sometimes those suggestions are ill-informed. Sometimes those suggestions are selfish (buff x class “cuz it’s my fave and I want to roll over everyone”). Sometimes those suggestions are so great that it inspires us to add a new project to the backlog. Sometimes those suggestions are already a part of the project we are working on.

Most of the time, we can’t immediately implement good suggestions. These things take time and discussion. These things have to be weighed against other things and prioritized.

All of this doesn’t matter though, if the 4%-10% spends little to no time giving us feedback for one reason or another (inactive, don’t care, think we don’t listen even if that’s wrong, etc.).

Ideally, you would all feel comfortable and willing to share your objective feedback, but that is not always the case, and that is not something we can control.

We play PvP quite often, actually. Some of us are more “casual,” while others are more hardcore. Some of the devs have even competed at the high level in various games before joining the team. We experiment with new builds and countering the meta as well.

We won’t compete in the game because that is not fair to the players. We do however play rated matches occasionally (usually during our Friday play sessions). If you want to for-sure catch us in game, come play from 5-6pm PST on Fridays. Many of us play outside that time as well, though at random times and days.

Most of us are hooked up to the Shoutcast Notifier and will keep an eye on high rated matches to see how the meta is up top as well.

We do also have systems to tell us what things are run the most/least, etc.

So yeah, all those things and more.

Actually, since the launch of the game, the PvP team has only grown in size. The problem is, that we’ve started doing 2 week releases of PvE content, which makes the PvP side look sorely lacking. One thing to think about is that PvP is a much different beast from PvE. We can’t just churn out content (events, bosses, dungeons, etc.) the way the PvE teams do. We are developing systems. They are using existing systems to spawn content. They are two very very different beasts.

I’ve seen comments that the PvP team is stubborn. Sorry, but in this case I am actually going to stubbornly (couldn’t resist) say that is not true. We are extremely receptive to feedback, but we also have realistic goals with the systems we are implementing. Systems take time to develop.

As always, we really appreciate the feedback and love you all have for the game.

Btw – Banning players is a simple solution, but not a preferable or sustainable one.

Gandarel.5091:

But on the otherhand, you barely do anything to prevent it. Slow mitigation is nothing.

It’s not as simple as hitting a switch. This issue has been one that we have had several discussions over. The problem is that many of the solutions are either too complex, or they hurt a portion of our player base, etc.

Also, we can’t say when/if we have a solution to the issue, because when we do we see a huge increase in players abusing it (at the beginning of the month, I said that we had a fix to help mitigate it, and we saw the numbers skyrocket).

You will just have to trust that we will protect the integrity of the game as soon as possible.

This is definitely an interesting idea. I’m not 100% convinced it’d be good for all maps, but maybe it hints at a new game mode?

I want to add that ideas like this are what we’re looking for. Things that might sound crazy to some, or are outside of the box, are the ones that tend to spark ideas on our end. Of course, we definitely appreciate all kinds of feedback, but it’s great to see new suggestions like this.

Thanks for sharing!

FYI – Situational awareness will still be important with the changes coming to Skyhammer.

We’ve taken a few steps to address this so far (turning off tournament commands, disabling glory gain if tournament commands are enabled, rewarding glory at the end of the match), and we are continuing to work toward completely stopping this behavior.

The closest thing to druid is actually probably Elementalist. Each of the attunements are kind of similar to the different forms in druid:

water = tree (lots of healing)
earth = bear (lots of defensive/armor)
air = cat (lots of movement)
fire = moonkin (lots of damage)

Another good place to ask might be in-game as well. The good thing about GW2 PvP is you can try any class you like without having to grind to get gear just to compete. I would recommend trying a variety of things.

There are also some great websites with build tips as well. Here’s a good one that just got their guides and build calculators up: http://intothemists.com/

Thanks for starting this thread, Kline.9561! I’ll make sure the team sees it.

Please refer to the post where we have already responded to this.

We had one change last week, and are looking into other ways to prevent this behavior.

Thanks

Thanks for sharing your ideas and thoughts, all! I’ve passed this feedback on to the team.

It is a bug! The fix is coming on the 15th.

Thanks for reporting it, anyway!

So, our programmer looked into it and says that Skyhammer is actually one of the least played maps in the last 7 days. Looks like you guys just hit random.

Kline.9561, a lot of the tips/suggestions you make in your post are things that are big focuses for us. The good news is that some of that work is spread out over several different teams, so while it might take a while to develop, we have a lot of great features coming to help with barrier to entry, etc.

As for monetization, that’s a bit more difficult considering we already give a lot of the things that can be monetized away as we don’t want to have a huge barrier to entry in PvP. If you have suggestions for stuff like that, feel free to share!

It seems like many of you aren’t experiencing a lot of Skyhammer pops, but some are. It does sound random, but I’ve passed it on to the team anyway just in case.

Thanks for the reports!

I posted in here in response to the other skyhammer thread by accident.

Yes, we’ve seen some of the more competitive teams disband or leave. There’s a pretty big drop-off in skill from the top tier, which means that anyone in the top tier doesn’t need to put as much effort in to practice.

We can’t stop people from leaving. What we can do is keep developing the game until it’s in a good place, and those players don’t want to leave, or want to come back. In the meantime, I will continue to focus on helping support members of the community that do put in the extra effort to run tournaments or help new players. That’s the beauty of having a sub-free game.

I know that’s probably not the answer you guys were looking for, but we are still working on the game. Yes, it’s likely not as fast as you want it to be, but there isn’t much we can do on that front except to keep pushing forward.

Thanks for the support!

We aren’t planning any tournaments right now, though we are helping/supporting some community-driven tournaments that are coming up!

Is anybody else seeing a high percentage of Skyhammer like the OP? If so, how many games have you played and how many of them were Skyhammer?

Hey all,

This thread is to congratulate the team that won the MLG Invitational tournament. Please keep it on topic, or take your off-topic discussion to a different thread.

Thank you!

Keep an eye out tomorrow! We will have a special guest joining us in the mists…

:D

FYI – Nobody is stopping you 15v15 supporters from hosting your own tournaments. Just sayin’.

If you compare it to other games right now, it’s pretty low, but not bad! There’s definitely some room for improvement, and we’re talking about ways we can help with that for future tournaments.

Hey all!

As many of you may know already, team Denial Esports won the MLG Guild Wars 2 Invitational last Friday. Please join me in congratulating them, it’s well deserved!

Congrats!!

Haha, there was an issue with the filter grabbing “st” – should be fixed now.

The stream can be viewed here:
www.majorleaguegaming.com

xD

That’s a great mentality. You do realize that if there’s data that people like GW2 PvP, and it gets more popular, that it could = more resources? It’s cool though. If you don’t want to watch, you don’t have to.

Balance updates on the Oct. 15.

So many kittens in your pokitten!

We’ll be talking about some balance updates during the MLG tournament happening today, so you should check it out!

Alright, I wasn’t going to post here, but I want to stop you all in your tracks in thinking that this post was in any way made or prompted by ArenaNet. That is simply not true.

It looks like Caine here is trying to reiterate things we have already messaged, but go largely ignored, as well as sharing his/her experience in the community.

Thank you all for taking the time to share your concerns.

Great feedback! I’ll make sure the guys see it.

Thanks for taking the time to make the video!

Like I said, we’re looking into other options to prevent the exploiting.

Fix incoming! Thanks for pointing it out.

We’re changing it so that glory is only rewarded at the end of a match, which should stop the exploit where players leave and rejoin the match. We are also actively looking into other options to prevent this exploiting.

Thanks for the report!

Maybe the mechanics don’t need to be changed in order to create the strong connection that the OP mentioned is missing.

And yes, I did pass this on. We don’t reject ideas instantly, either. Sometimes it is one idea that inspires other great ideas, which is why threads like this are great. Just because it’s a suggestion that could mean a possibly unlikely overhaul doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share it!

We really appreciate the feedback, and would like to see this conversation going with more ideas if you have them!

Thanks

Excellent feedback! I’ll pass this on to the team.

Thanks for the effort!

Thanks for the constructive feedback! You make a lot of good points, though I am curious about one thing:

In #1 you’re saying that you can’t understand enough of the combat without being latched on to one specific player. Then, in #2, you say that epic skills should have epic animations. If we did #2, would that help with #1?

I see a couple problems with following players while shoutcasting; First, it puts the focus mostly on 1 entity in the fight, when there could easily be things happening around/behind that player that the casters might miss due to not being able to see them. Second, it is more difficult to control what’s happening with the camera. There isn’t much we can do about this as we can’t tell players to sit still so the camera doesn’t jerk around.

So, it makes me wonder if these two problems, maybe even #3 as well, would be alleviated with better skill tells and maybe less skill effects. Either way, I think we have a few options to help with the problems you feel happening in the shoutcasted matches.

FYI – ESL tourney had 1.8-2k concurrent viewers during the stream (not to mention #s from non-English streams). Maybe Blu can share with us the total number of unique viewers during the stream – but if it’s anything like the other GW2 tournaments, it’s probably around 30-50k unique viewers. I’d say that’s pretty good considering the LoL championship and GvG streams were happening at the same time!

The balance in PvE vs PvP will always be different, but there are certain tools that will help make the swap less jarring once they are complete. What I’m talking about is templates. If you played GW, they had templates that you could create and share with friends both in the game and outside of the game.

These templates would save all of your characters stats (armor, weapons, traits, skills) so that you could click a button and everything would swap over. This is something we would like to do in GW2 to help players swap between different areas of the game.

I’ll talk with the team on Monday about this. Hang tight for an update!

We’re working on getting them uploaded to youtube! I’ll share a link once I get one.

Np!

The VoD is up – we split the video up so that each of the portions were separate.

Here’s the PvP portion: http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2895738
Here’s the big one: http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/454437568

Also, If players took the time to look back in our posting history, they would see that in the course of this past year, we have announced and talked about every major feature we have shipped, or are working on, as well as the many QoL features. If that is not transparency, there must be some definition on Urban Dictionary that I am missing.

Sure, but keep in mind that most of the suggestions or feedback that is posted on this forums is either in development, on our backlog, or simply impossible to do with our game engine. We are extremely transparent when we cannot do certain things.

The tournament was not necessarily for new players. While watching the game can be fun and engaging, we fully recognize that a tournament is not all that is important keep the game going and pull in more players. This tournament was a product of the community team, not the dev team. If the community team can keep a percentage of our playerbase happy by providing and supporting tournaments, then why shouldn’t we if that doesn’t take away from development?

A lot of you seem to have this perception that “tournament = less features”, but that is just wrong. At most, the tournament meant that I might not have had as much time to post on the forums as I would have liked. That’s not to say that every Wednesday I didn’t spend 2-4 hours reading, responding, and forwarding your feedbackitten

ep seeing “it’s been a year, and nothing has changed.” Frankly, one would have to be completely removed from the game to honestly think that. In one year, we’ve seen Custom Arenas, Spectator Mode, Solo and Team Arenas, Paid tournaments come and go, Permanent stops, new maps, and many, MANY QoL issues addressed. Not to mention the many changes coming in from the Balance team.

How can you even say that? If you honestly think you put more into this game than we do, you have absolutely no concept of what we do on a regular basis.

No, it was not dishonest. I had a great time with the players, and it was a sad occasion to have to watch half of them lose in the tournament. We spent a lot of time together this weekend, and had a lot of fun. There’s nothing forced about that.

Hey all,

I just wanted to thank everyone for watching the PAX Invitational this weekend, but to also thank CC and SYNC for making things easy.

Through all of the trash talking that has been directed towards you guys before/after the event, I feel the need to say that you were absolutely a pleasure to meet and hang out with. I know there are a lot of feelings about this event, and your teams, so I just wanted to emphasize that you guys demonstrated that people are wrong about you.

You were all very professional, and fun to be around. Thanks for coming, and being a part of this major milestone in Guild Wars 2 PvP!!!

<3 Much love from ANet! Can’t wait to meet more of our PvPers

Hi.

Still here, sort of. My family is in town and the fact is, my mother is quite demanding of my time (sorry if you’re reading this mum, I loves you).

The invitational is tomorrow. After that, I’ll be able to spend a bit more time on the forums. Also, I’ll talk to some devs about getting on here. Keep in mind though, any time that they spend posting on the forums takes away from the time that they are implementing. More posting = less features.

Hug it out

Rambodacious.7495 – whoa! Talk about some awesome feedback! Really appreciate the time you put into your post and it’s constructive manner. Definitely not a waste of my time.

Phaeton.9582, thanks for the encouragement!

Lordrosicky.5813:

Balance takes time. Fine. But when you then release patches that have stupid unfun mechanics (fear/spirits/immunities/stuns/evasion) buffed to the sky then people hate the meta. If you werent aware that this meta would develop then you have bad testers. Most top players knew after 30 minutes with the dhuumfire patch that necro, spirirt ranger and sword thief were going to be a huge problem.

A good system would be to actually understand the implications of balance before you do it by having a good team procedure.

Your balance team is:

1, Always behind the curve in a way in which other developers of other games are not.
2, Then too slow to respond to issues when they arise.

And you are talking down to players saying “You dont understand how it works” or things to that effect. To alot of us this isnt just a game. It is a community. It is like a football team you support. You cant change supporting it because you are tied into it. We are tied into this game by time investment and by the relationships we have established whilst playing the game. So you might think we are an unproductive ignorant bunch of whiners and sensationalists. But we aren’t. We are just people who are tied into something which is sinking fast. GW2

Thanks for the feedback! I’m sorry if I came off as condescending, that is actually not at all what I meant. What I’m trying to do is help you guys to understand how things work here, and why things are done the way they are done, and how you can help if you really want to. Please don’t misunderstand me, or the rest of the team for that matter.

We’re just as much a part of this community as you. We all play the game, too. We try to be as involved in events as possible. If those efforts go unnoticed, fine, but you can’t say that we don’t support our community. That is just wrong, just like this statement “you might think we are an unproductive ignorant bunch of whiners and sensationalists.” – We don’t think that at all.