*I feel like this is already being touched on somewhere but I dont/havent checked the forums so Ill post this thread anyway, nobody whine about that please
Who thought that would be a good idea? Making a viable build is half the battle, now we’ve got people with the ability to become cookie cutters and take a trait trees just like that. This isnt good for pvp, were gonna end up with a bunch of copies running around.
It’s exactly this “PK/duel” player mentality from open world PvP in other games that’s holding the competitive PvP back in this game. No notion of cross-profession balance, no way to know what you’re facing before you get roftstomped by insta-gib overpowered build, no sense of evolving meta or people constantly adapting to the current FOTM and creating counter-counter builds on the fly.
If anything, what is needed to fix broken professions and builds is complete transparency of all hosted matched in the hot-join lobby and tournaments, so even a top 50 player can’t hide behind a no-rank smurf account and think he’s great because competition hasn’t caught up to a 1000th game-breaking bug winning him a game.
<snip>
Good post but not sure I agree. Builds and team set ups become common knowledge relatively quickly regardless as to whether or not you can directly observe a players build when spectating a match. Transparency is fantastic, but given we are talking about a game in which builds do make an impact (and not an FPS), then bemoaning a player or team with a “secret sauce” build seems somewhat odd.
Furthermore there is nothing inherently wrong with a player or team working out a combination which is highly effective and original. It is up to the rest of the playerbase to try and catch up, or at least to try and work out what is happening.
As far as the balance/bug point goes. Well one would hope that the dev team actually knew what they where doing and was capable of balancing out the professions given they should have an intimate knowledge of how they work. True the playerbase will always find a way to eek out things which the devs missed or never intended, but with or without a spectator mode, these things get found out and reported/moaned about (and rightly so) quickly.
The issue is often that the dev team (not ANET per say, speaking of dev teams in general) then either takes forever to do anything about it, or the solution they propose is often worse than the original issue.
Yes a good level of transparency is beneficial. But no, I don’t think the option to turn off people in spectator mode looking at your build would suddenly diminish competition, nor is it purely something indicative of some kind of open world/pkr mindset.