1. Easy to get in. The game need to be acceptableness any one and easy to start playing and understand basic concepts of game. At the same time it needs to be so simple that people who don’t play it can watch it and have good guess what’s going on.
This is the primary reason GW2’s conquest-style would not fly for spectating, unless ArenaNet made a very good spectating client that provided information in a way a complete outsider could understand.
Professional sports thrive on spectators who themselves do not play the sport. Most people who watch baseball or basketball probably do not play either sport.
ArenaNet can’t assume its E-Sport spectating is only for people who play the game, or it will never go anywhere.
Actually, dragons in WvW would be awesome. I wouldn’t mind if all PvE was removed from WvW except dragons or other “boss” type creatures (e.g. giants).
However, you don’t just throw in “dragon event” in some barren corner of the map as a distraction for players to fight. Don’t make this another dumb grub.
You make the dragon part of the WvW struggle.
The dragon could be involved:
As a neutral party that randomly spawns once in awhile around areas where a large amount of players are located. The dragon attacks anyone.
As a “siege engine” that could be purchased and ordered to attack your foes. You wouldn’t ride it or control it, although that could be a cool idea.
As a keep upgrade, and the dragon would patrol the skies and protect your keep. However, this could have the effect of making winning teams on imbalanced matches being nigh impossible to defeat.
As a rare bonus for underdogs or servers who are greatly underpopulated. The dragon would aid the underdogs for awhile or until killed.
Personally I am only in favor of option 1: Dragon as a neutral party that randomly spawns in areas of mass player population. Dragons in Guild Wars lore-sense don’t fight for anyone, so a neutral dragon only makes sense. Plus, it would be pure chaos and add a new dimension to battles if a dragon suddenly shows up in your 3-way battle. The dragon’s AI would have to be tuned so that it favors attacking anyone in the vicinity, not just those who have attacked it, and make it so it can attack those on walls within a keep’s wall, from air. Otherwise dragons would just serve to inadvertently defend keeps.
Bickering aside, go watch some sPvP streams on Twitch. is it exciting? Not really.
I haven’t played WoW in a few years, but watching Reckful’s arena streams are more entertaining than sPvP will ever be. It’s not because it’s Reckful, I don’t know anything about him except he’s a top player, but that WoW’s high-end arena is actually entertaining to watch. Can’t say the same for sPvP. At least not conquest-style sPvP.
Conquest-style would require some amazing spectator tools to make it watch-worthy.
The OP is right, but in the wrong ways. I’ve been playing Engineer since BWE2.
The Engineer is, unquestionably, under-powered in sPvP and WvW against other professions.
However, that doesn’t mean the Engineer isn’t fun. It provides enough complexity and variance to be very rewarding in its own right. The reward is not from performance, rather from sheer play-style and versatility the Engineer provides. That’s the very reason I keep coming back to the Engineer even after mastering other professions.
In PvE the Engineer is extremely rewarding and I highly encourage it. In WvW you are best suited to be on the walls throwing grenades, or in the back lines, and not out in the open.
Anything else is secondary. ArenaNet can add all the carrot-on-a-stick systems they want, but at the end of the day if you can’t see your opponents, or if you can’t even compete because your team is outnumbered 5:1, then it’s all moot.
As long as they deliver in 2013, and preferably sooner than later, that’s all that matters.
Every feature they mentioned is the majority of everything people wanted. Well, except dueling. Custom arenas don’t cut it for dueling.. people want dueling like how it works in World of Warcraft. That is, easy and open.
The OP’s build has been tried and tired since Day 1. There is nothing NEW about it.
It’s glass-cannon, so expect to die really easily in tPvP. It’s your typical hot-join sPvP build.
The damage isn’t that great when you have targets whom are intelligent and actually stay mobile and spread apart.
Grenades is worse today than it was at release, so I’m baffled at anyone preaching Grenades as if they’re this new amazing thing Engineers have just discovered. They’re not. They really don’t do that much damage anymore, and I’m saying this as an Engineer who had full Level 80 exotics like 2 weeks after release. That’s when Grenades were actually good, and even then it sometimes paled compared to Cluster Bomb and always has paled compared to Bomb Kit’s damage.
1. Make Mortar not suck in anything but WvW. You might start with having Eilte Supplies actually do something for Mortar some day.
2. Make Elixir X not suck, period. Or replace it.
3. Make Scope not suck. Up it to 50%. Standing still is a big deal in a game about mobility.
4. Make kits not suck, by giving them stats.
5. Make turrets not suck in WvW and sPvP. They’re too easy to destroy, and their damage is pathetic.
They communicate a lot. It’s just the communication tends to be vague, because for some reason ArenaNet is afraid of angry feedback if they tell us their development plans ahead of time and those plans don’t release partially or entirely. Really now, this is the Internet. You would think they’d be more desensitized.
Why is there so much empty space along the borders of every map? Nobody ventures out there except for bots looking to be unnoticed.
In my opinion, spread the bases further to the sides of the map. It would make each map seem larger too, and more battles would take place between points.
So that leaves us with issue #3: client performance. Some time ago the WvW team acquired an engine programmer who is focused 100% on this issue (and he is being assisted by another engine programmer who isn’t officially on the WvW team). They’re working on some really fantastic optimizations and engine modifications which we hope will allow even min-spec clients to render all the players on a WvW map. We’ll be talking in more detail about the specific changes they’re making when things get just a little more nailed down, but I can say right now that I’m very impressed with the work they’ve done already.
Since client-side is your largest hurdle, why not add “culling” as a configurable slider under Graphic Settings? Ultimately FPS is at stake, so let the players decide if they want more players visible or better performance. You should, of course, first optimize to the best you can for minimum-performance machines, but in the event you can’t remove culling completely and are being held back by minimum-performance machines, make it a Graphic Setting like any other Graphic Setting that minimum-performance machines don’t have the requirements for. It’s not like they can’t play the game still, they just can’t see everyone, but don’t let them hold back the rest of your players from enjoying the game.
What they are afraid of with 1v1 ranking is that it will show how bad class balance is in the game. But they should not be afraid of it but embrace it, because it is essential part of good balancing system (which I will explain in another post).
This is part of it.
Realistically, the development cost is the major issue. GW2 probably already has such a deeply-engrained infrastructure that such changes would require massive rewrite of code. In other words, it’s the kind of features you need to build from the ground up — like when developing a new game. I’m not hopeful of GW2 having traditional death-match style arena brackets.
As for class balancing and 1v1, there is literally no historical data that 1v1 would impede balancing for other game modes. Why? There is no evidence for it. There is no MMO that has 1v1 PvP brackets, at least no mainstream MMO. Everyone who claims 1v1 would impair balancing has no concrete proof, only theory.
This isn’t really the type game you play for 5-10 minutes a day.
You’re right, it isn’t. There’s no infrastructure for it. Hence the OP’s post.
It take 5-10 minutes for me to form up a whole group while I can do other stuff during that time and each tournament takes like 30 minutes.
That’s the problem. If there were 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3, particularly death-match and not conquest, tournament games would be shorter.
Or you could just hotjoin which is intended for casual play hop in/out whenever.
Ah, there it is. The other thing no MMO company has seem to figure out. There are players out there that aren’t casual, that are skilled, but who don’t have the time nor interest of finding a bunch of anons to play with and would rather play with a small group of friends or solo — but still compete competitively in the ladders.
LoL figured it out. We just need the LoL developers to make a PvP MMO.
1. Create 5 ladders: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 and 5v5.
2. Map style: Deathmatch Arena a la coliseum-style.
3. Create an webpage ladder and in-game interface that shows the top players/teams for each bracket.
4. ???
5. Profit!
And yes, I said 1v1. No, it doesn’t need to be balanced. It doesn’t even need to reward anything. It’s just for fun, because face it, some people like to just log on and play 1v1 and test their personal skill without relying on others.
I think that game designers should stop pretending ‘they know the best what is fun and what is not fun’ and just provide decent infrastructure and let people decide what is fun to play/watch.
THIS x 1000000000000000000000000.
I’ve felt the same way forever.
Someday a great MMO is going to release that actually gets it. Give us the means of having fun on our own time and contraints when it comes to group configuration. Every MMO forces you into 5 man, 10 mans, 15 mans, etc. How about variable? Make a system that scales difficulty/rewards/content based on how many players you have.
I would be interested in scope getting a critical chance increase from 10 to 25% since 10 seems so little if your are forced to stand still.
But of course they have to fix it first to see if 10% is actually worth the stand or not. I’m just doing a preemptive complaint
I would like to see scope give 50%. Or perhaps a stacking buff that gives 10% more crit, every X seconds, upwards of 80-100%, for the longer you’ve been standing still (the buff is reset when you move). Standing still in PvP is doom, and a trait that encourages it should give some pretty amazing benefits.
Aside from general long-withstanding bug fixes, all we really need right now is a damage buff via kits receiving stats — and ArenaNet said they are working on it.
Kit refinement – removed
no, but instead:
Kit refinement – Med Kit now gives an AoE replenishment on use (15 sec CD); Flamethrower now adds an AoE burn
Since the patch, I’ve found Sigil of Energy to be pretty hilarious in a kit-centric build along with the 99% uptime swiftness/vigor traits. You dodge everything.
That could simply be poor wording on ArenaNet’s part.
This game is full of bugs, I’m not convinced until they fix the tool-tip. For ArenaNet to expect all its players to read its forum patch notes is silly.
Not a bug, drinking elixers is now supposed to grant you 2 stacks.
That’s not what the tool-tip says, nor has ever.
Why would it make sense for HGH to give 1 stack to thrown and 2 to consumed? If HGH was ever to only apply to consumed elixirs, it would give nothing to thrown.
If HGH is suppose to give 2 to consumed only, they need to update the trait’s tool-tip to avoid confusion or ambiguity.
Bug. Report it everywhere you can (/bug, bug thread, bug forum)
The more people who report it, the sooner ArenaNet will realize it’s important, the quicker it will get fixed. Please let’s not have this bug take months to fix.
Power Shoes is useless for a bunker, Speedy Kits is better (a bunker probably is using at least 1 kit).
For a damage dealer with some toughness, I suppose taking Power Shoes could be better instead of taking Infused Precision. A damage-dealer with at least 1 kit is still better served with Speedy Kits.
A lot of the profession changes are kind of “huh?”, and I’m guessing unless we’re ranked in the top tPvP teams you probably can’t fathom the reason they changed it. (i.e. ArenaNet is probably making changes based on how the top teams perform)
Sigils are just an excuse as to why ArenaNet nerfed Grenades.
They gave us more sigils to increase build diversity. ArenaNet sees all engineers only relying on Grenades, so they nerfed it to force us into other builds.
I’m not saying this is good at all, I’m just saying.
There are no exceptional players, only exceptional teams. Just watch a player from an exceptional team play in a PuG. They’ll win and die as much as the rest.
It’s not that you can’t tell who’s an enemy; it’s that it’s hard to tell what team you’re on. If you see yourself wearing red but you’re on the blue team, it’s kind of confusing, especially if you didn’t know they made this change.
Maybe for beginners, but otherwise who hasn’t memorized their team’s starting locations for every map?
With custom arenas, people will be able to duel all day long (1v1, or 2v2, or 3v3), so it seems to me that we need to focus more on rankings and leaderboards.
I just hope you don’t ignore actual Dueling for Custom Arenas. Instanced dueling is lame. You have to basically find people who want to join your server, and then duel them in a Conquest objective-based PvP map, which is kind of gimmicky.
Real dueling should be like how it is in WoW. You could designate an area in The Mists where people can duel, and people can come and go to duel. You can duel total strangers much easier than dueling inside an instance. It kills time between queues.
Deciding to stomp someone based on the timer is a gimmick. Calling it strategy is a facade by hardcore players pretending it’s not a cheap gimmick over teams ignorant of the mechanic.
But 20 seconds is too long. Reduce it to 12 seconds or something.
I just don’t understand ArenaNet’s rationale for this. It’s so gimmicky. Especially when Quickness is involved.
You think it opens more strategy to watch for enemy players when killing the enemy bosses? The same can be said if boss kills were determined by whatever team dealt the most damage.
I used to like Rally/Downed/Stomping, thinking it gave combat another dimension, but now I think it just opens a can of worms for exploits and balancing issues. They should just remove Downed.
