Guild Wars 2

Quentin Fields.1295:

bhagwad.4281:

I asked why and how I could benefit…and he wasn’t able to give me an answer.

Did you know that WvW points also giving you bonuses in PvE? Like Crafting bonuses etc?

Which is actually kind of silly, since you can’t really do both. And since the economy is all linked, there’s no “I’m increasing gathering for the good of my server to bring down prices!” factor either. This is one thing they should toss out and go back to drawing board. Despite the whining from “fair play” types…would actually make more since to give bonuses for WvW that help your side in WvW…

Also, they were almost always heavily gear-advantaged/rank-advantaged.

They attempted to balance the siege vs the roamers in Warhammer but most claim they went too far..

This game will certainly be more like Warhammer in that they are already rewarding keep takes…you’d be crazy to think these additional rewards will be for kills only I think. Chances are they’ll try to strike a balance and good luck…

Eh, it’s clearly not working as intended… why do people feel the need to improve their own self-esteem by pretending it’s just a “challenge”.

If it’s many times more difficult than the other bosses and you get the same loot…nobody will do it…therefore issue! Not a difficult equation.

Reviving IS a valid tactic against people who gank and/or frontload damage. Basically, you want a counter to your ability nerfed. Invoking the meaningless word “skill” is meaningless. They could say reviving people before you stomp them or preventing stomps is a “skill”?

Also your premise that no other game does this is just wrong. DAOC and Warhammer, two big open-world RvR examples…both had long distance resurrections with cast times of a couple seconds. This game requires melee range and everybody can resurrect…but on balance it’s about a wash.

I’d say in the arena of PvP-based MMOs ….the games where ressurrecting is easy to moderately difficult outnumber those where it’s difficult or nearly impossible….

Both WoW and Warhammer are better than this game overall currently. But to be fair this game is new and DOES have an opportunity to get better. (Whereas neither of those really will).

They could start by abandoning the e-sport nonsense and implementing battlegrounds/scenarios of the traditional style…. I think before they do that they’ll have to fully have accepted sPvP/tPvP is a small niche though because they don’t want to ‘steal’ players from it…

They don’t have any desire to promote solo people running around ganking and capping points and avoiding fights either. In fact between that and your ‘zerging’…both the developers and the majority of players would choose zerging.

Vast majority of people join a 5v5 or 8v8 because they want a 5v5 or 8v8 fight.. these are not large numbers of people (and calling them a zerg is somewhat laughable)!

The real mystery is why they made all these relatively complex 3-flag maps for such small fights…

If the revivers are required to typically push to a body to revive it then the attackers should be required to typically push to the body to prevent it…not spam AE from a wall.

Some have a religious belief against reviving in combat and some clearly don’t like it because it acts as a counter against ganking and glass-cannons…. but neither is a good excuse for this lopsided situation. Of course there have been MMOs that had ranged ressurrection in-combat and have made it work as part of the strategy. Frankly, design wise, you usually don’t want to not knock players out of a fight just because of one mistake or bad luck and encourage people to push because usually it results in fights that are more fun.

It’s clearly weak in some cases and strong in other cases.

However it’s stupid and annoying all of the time! Just remove things that require you to stare at buff bars on general principle….

I think so they can trash talk each other in chat after fights.

I think the worst part of downed state is not downed state itself but the abilities given.
If you can stall your staking or move around…it sort of works contrary to the whole concept of being dead inside your lines and rezzable vs in enemy lines and not….and the idea of pushing to prevent rezzes or allow rezzes on your side.

All of the teleport/movement/CC abilities seem to just promote stalling or mashing a button to “win” (in this case escaping) and not really add much to strategy in the game in this format or sPvP….

By your logic, no stationary area effect could ever be overpowered no matter what it does.

The ‘but there’s counters’ argument is total garbage honestly. You can counter absolutely any ability in the game by staying ~3000 units from every other player! Either an ability makes the game more interesting, balanced, exciting and/or fun or it does not. Any ability that almost everybody feels they ‘need to have’ in any format is probably already got two of three strikes against it…

It’s horrible ability design to give player A the ability to give allied player B a penalty, FYI… I would say no way that would ever happen but you never know with these guys, they don’t seem to have learned many of the lessons of other MMOs….

At any rate it should be a penalty on the Mesmer only and I think an appropriate penalty might be spontaneous combustion?

I am very curious why this game has such large bandwidth requirements compared to other games, when I don’t notice such a huge difference between it and other games. Really the ‘limit’ where issues start to occur seems to be just a relative handful of people compared to other games… not sure if it’s been discussed.

Also, there is a claim it works well in PvE, but that’s not the case. Temple of Grenth, for example, has issues and wipes a lot because people can’t see the ‘adds’ when the spawn. (Again, it seems to happen with a relatively small number of people).

I understand you need to defend decisions, I guess, but this like so many other design decisions seems based on the fact that you thought small fights like SPvP 8v8 and 5v5 were going to be more popular and “serious” formats and large event PvE and WvWvW were less important…. but what happens when you are proven wrong like it seems you are going to be? I think everybody in WvWvW would rather it be like most games and take update rate and framerate hits….

I have two sets:

One is stuff so people concentrate more on fights:

1) Real auto-loot in WvWvW. (No having to check for glowy bags if you need badges)
2) Remove any trash mobs and PvE junk that’s not related to the WvWvW campaign.
3) More waypoints or easier to upgrade-to waypoints in the major structures.

One is more combat-related..

1) Drastically reduce the amount of pets, teleporting, stealthing, and portaling.
2) Provide options to turn down/off non-useful and over the top spell effects, provide feedback on downed and dead players (as above mentioned, maybe different color names)
3) Siege needs to be about fighting doors, walls and other siege…not players.

As usual, a bunch of people who think less people automagically means more skillz… if you believe that why not just do 1v1? Of course different fight sizes require different types of strategies…or should if the game is well-designed?

In no other MMO-style game is 8 people a ‘zerg’… and that’s assuming all 8 stick together …which never happens in any of the 8v8 hotjoins I’ve seen?

Basically, you want to force everybody into your idea of what the game is about (evidently button-mashing execution and counter-button mashing in 1v1 and other really small fights)…. despite the fact that 8v8 was first and presumably what the devs designed the game to initially?

You guys think by NPCs I’m talking about keep lords…but really I’m talking about the trash mobs stuck everywhere, even inches from roads, that you see trailing and annoying everybody that serve no purpose. (Since running through mobs in this game is easy, they don’t even effectively create ‘shape’ or encourage people to stick to roads most of the time)

Keep Lords, etc, and even the Boss Mobs are not what I meant. I’m not crazy about the weird PvE camps at the top of each persons home frontier either, but they rarely matter so it’s no huge deal…

I can’t imagine it’s bandwidth, honestly. I think they are limiting graphics to avoid slideshow mode. These games really don’t take up huge amounts of bandwidth compared to other things we do on the internet these days. (Unless this game specifically is doing something wrong/weird?)

I’ve played many good ones and tried to avoid bad ones like those that throw random NPC mobs inches from roads and places where it’s clear fights will happen. Or who make overpowered siege weapons that when dropped in numbers make attacking a structure unwise, impossible, and most importantly of all..completely frustrating and un-fun?

Sporadicus.1028:

I’ve never played Dark Age of Camelot, but is (was?) that game closer to GW2’s WvW idea than RvR from Warhammer?

That’s probably a true statement as DAOC allowed more smaller roaming groups to do things and was much faster paced (you could easily die in seconds), but GW2 WvWvW reminds me more of Wintergrasp in WoW than anything else, honestly.

Actually it’s Wintergrasp with even more of a focus on resource gathering and siege over fighting…which is saying a lot!

We have different opinions about the causes of death of Warhammer, what I consider the best RvR game to date… I would submit that large scale fighting is what a large percentage of RvR players show up for….and that Warhammer did a fine job of it. Battlefield tactics were always there…the game was often criticized for it’s slow pace because people DID survive in large skirmishes for a long time and nearly endless battles could rage on.

But I guess you can disagree there, but on the subject of penalizing players I’ll never understand the ‘hardcore’ PvPers sadomasochistic tendency. Discouraging people helps nobody. In the case of this game, I’d be willing to make a large wager that the rather steep armor penalty is there only because the game is Free To Play and they wanted to MAKE sure there was a moneysink in place for players who chose to primarily do WvW…. all it really does is punish people who take risks and don’t follow the zerg. (Which is how you make money in WvWvW…. zerg and quit when things go bad)

Just gonna put this out there, this game should have learned all this from other games. Now, it needs to learn them for next patch….!

1. You don’t need NPC mobs everywhere getting in the way of PvP fights.
2. Siege is a tool that fights revolve around…not a weapon that makes actual characters obsolete.
3. Reward staying and fighting over running away at first sign of trouble.
4. Don’t penalize people for taking chances. (Armor repair costs, for an example…)
5. Maps can be really pretty simple and getting back into fights in a reasonable time makes things more fun.

I’m sure there are more. In some cases, like #4, I’m willing to make some excuses because you’re free to play and need more money sinks. But these are kind of obvious “knowns” now, aren’t they?

Latorn.4209:

Zosk.5609:

What is your evidence of WvW doing great? Doing better than PvP is not surprising at all since despite the fantasy, most MMO players don’t want to play a MOBA or an “e-sport”… Arena is like the least popular thing in WoW, I think?

I gave a reason why I thought it was doing better than SPvP, actual rewards, maybe “thriving” was a bad word to choose. I would say it’s doing pretty well though, what is your evidence that it isn’t doing well? My server has a healthy queue time for the Eternal BGs.

And Arena is the least popular thing in WoW??? For one, it’s what they’ve built their “e-sport” on, for evidence as to it’s popularity just look at twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/World%20of%20Warcraft:%20Mists%20of%20Pandaria

Arena was pretty much what I did when I played WoW =P

Neither the fact you enjoyed it or it is their ‘e-sport’ mode indicates that it’s popular. WoW is of course, PvE-centered and all other things in the game got played more than Arena. (General PvE, Dungeons, Raids, Battlegrounds, Wintergrasp…everything!)

People who say ‘e-sport’ without a chuckle are not really playing MMOs… I think Warcraft demonstrates that and this game will (sadly for them) prove it.

But as far as WvW being healthy…only Anet has metrics but for a game that’s centered around PvE I sure see a lot more people in Cursed Shore than WvW zones a lot of the time…also there seem to be tons of people who find WvW so fun-free they’d rather just do a jumping puzzle every day. (Again, keep in mind everybody thought coming in that this game would be centered around PvP…so why is PvE so much more popular than anything else?)

My answer is the PvP combat mechanics just aren’t all that fun and interesting and currently the game is not drawing in the E-sport crowd from DOTA/LoL/etc OR PvP MMO players…but it’s just my opinion.

These boards, IMO, would be much more useful and informative if every mention of specific class balances was stricken from the record.

We all know it’s not a reason people participate or don’t participate, especially in SPVP where rolling up that superior class takes minutes. If PvP was fun, you’d not let the fact you picked a class you felt was inferior stop you from playing. Even in WvW, this game has a very low bar to get a new character up and running…

Yet I’d say every thread degrades into a discussion of class balance, which anybody who’s played an MMO before knows is an ENDLESS debate and will go through cycles for the life of the game anyway….

Actual discussions of why many people just aren’t finding PvP that fun…class/combat/game mechanics and maps and such… seem to just get sidelined however. Why not make a new board for pointless class balance bickering?

It would make more sense to make a game where there was more strategy options and classes had some focus… eventually the devs will abandon their silly promises or be replaced by the first new game with a mediocre or better PvP/RvR system…. (granted, that probably is enough time to make some money!)

What is your evidence of WvW doing great? Doing better than PvP is not surprising at all since despite the fantasy, most MMO players don’t want to play a MOBA or an “e-sport”… Arena is like the least popular thing in WoW, I think?

Don’t think it’s laziness, think they’ve just seen the failure of many great MMOs who have done excellent jobs hitting niches (like Warhammer for large-scale RvR/WvW, for an example).

Copy WoW’s McDonaldland approach with enough guildwarsiness to placate GW1 players and make it free to play…. seems like a recipe for an MMO that is a safe bet?

Reason we’re trolling these forums (or if you wanna be kind, trying to turn it into OUR personal version of the perfect game) is because sadly there’s nowhere better to go unless you want to invest 20 bucks a month in 10 year old and/or dying games.

You are right that you can balance pretty well on multiple levels, but you are wrong in thinking you can make a large number of interesting classes that are balanced for 1v1…. sorry, the only way to really do that is to make classes mostly the same with cosmetic differences.

The ironic thing is, this game clearly IS targetting smaller fights (1-5 players per side) which is why they avoid support and healing roles and why they are so concerned about ‘bunkers’ even though its the only thing currently making their game interesting!

Fights move too quickly and durations on everything is super low. And people who pretend like squeezing every inch out of their characters matters in this game are practicing wishful thinking. It’s mostly chase scenes and button mashing right now.

I am not sure why you give them data they have already. (If they aren’t tracking what classes are participating and winning in both WvW and PvP they probably need to be fired…)

And the idea that the ‘competitive’ top-tier part of the game needs worked on while most players are avoiding PvP and WvW because they are mostly unfun is pretty laughable. Whenever I shake my head and wonder what a dev team for a game like this is thinking, I read the forums and see that there are MUCH worse ideas they could be implementing.

Raytek.6193:

You’ve gotta be kidding here. There is tons of thought that goes into combat including targeting, positioning, who to focus, stomping, rezzing, bursting, healing, combo fields…

Leave the balance talk to the best players/top teams and ArenaNet.

Less thought compared to most other PvP and RvR oriented MMOs (which was the OP point). And the idea you should design the game for a fraction of 1% of the playerbase is just laughable. If you can’t make a game fun and enjoyable for players of different levels AND even different types then the MMO market is not for you? (This game has solo PvE, dungeons, WvW, and PvP for a reason..that’s what MMOs do!)

It’s fake slow though…I mean the TTK is pretty fast with so many glass-cannons but there’s so much teleporting, dodging to escape melee, and bunker builds with no counter (since the fights aren’t big enough to run assist trains).

I actually like a slower pace (I was one of the few who loved Warhammer Online)… but this game just seem schizophrenic and doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s a bit like WoW I guess in that it’s trying to be everything to everybody.

In fact, when people ask about the game I say..well it’s sort of a modernized but young WoW….but at least it’s free!

Probably get removed, but have to agree.

In it’s current state it’s probably the worst of any game I’ve played… the only excuse is they threw out the book with their wacky class design and combat mechanics, so they are starting from scratch and can’t learn enough from PvP/RvR games of the past like WoW, DAOC, Warhammer.

Since they seem to have this desire to chase “e-sport” status and these boards are overtaken with people who think a 5v5 is a borderline zerg, I expect the game will become better for WoW-arena style players and group vs group….but that’s about it without major changes.

Class balance is always going to be complained about and is not nearly as important as you people think.

Problem is overall combat design and other things…like a 5v5 on a 3-flag map ends up causing lots of very small fights where class balance issues will of course look like a major issue…whereas in a 10v10 or even a 5v5 where everybody is together…it becomes less about what buttons one person mashes.

Can’t have a ‘meta’ while you have such flaws with overall class and combat design.

Are classes more powerful than another because of special mechanics or strengths/weaknesses? No, not really…they are powerful because they just HAPPEN to have easy and solid glass cannon/roamer/bunker builds, I think?

In fact I would say with a shift in a few abilities any class could become anything so I’m never sure why people are so focused on class X is overpowered. The problem is really much deeper and more awful than “class balance”…. it’s just pretty lackluster combat design which seems like it will only ever appeal to the kind of folks who like WoW Arena style play.

You guys are very nice…it’s really quite awful.

The Mythic games covered this territory and the lessons were learned. Speed boosts should be very limited, melee classes need relatively easy snares/slows.

But they advertised a ‘frantic fast-paced game!!!’ so they threw it all out and now we get people teleporting and speed boosting all over the place and Keystone Kop chase scenes instead of positioning strategies.

Mesmers are already making WvW less fun with portals, and making 5v5 and 8v8 less fun by being the worst offender in all the annoying pet/clone spam.

Why shouldn’t they ruin some future 1v1 dueling system to? It’s a trifecta!

I don’t think Protection has a lot more skill…it seems the typical case of people associating skill with things they like about a game and calling other things skill-free. Some people on this forum especially want a very twitchy action-reaction, chase/escape 5v5 or smaller fight style game (and it seems like they’re getting it currently in this game). However, of course there’s “skill” involved with just about everything in every game so why even use that word if you want to make a serious point….

But to be specific, a Guardian with Shield equipped is going to use his Shield to gain protection pretty much whenever it cooldown is up and he’s taking (significant) damage…. not exactly rocket surgery here. You could probably just spam it honestly?

Idea is that mashing counter button when you think you see lots of damage coming is some super-skillful skilltastic skill!!!!….but building a toons gear and stat is just mindless, I guess! We can’t have the game requiring multiple types of thinking and different sorts of skills, that’s insanity!

Whenever somebody makes a constructive criticism and you start going on about “skill” or tell them to “L2P”…it’s a sure sign you have absolutely no point.

Rally could just restore some amount of health (25%?) other than 100% and problem pretty much solved…. but the trouble is it might get complicated trying to balance it for different fight sizes. (Like 25% makes sense in a 5v5 or 8v8, but not sure it really makes sense in WvW where 4 people could die and your side is still losing,)

It’s really not that complicated to understand and it happens in EVERY game (as far as I know) that wishes to focus on some particular form or forms of PvP.

They want people participating in the “supported” forms of PvP so they can fix things, figure out what’s wrong, rebalance, and not waste developer time on a feature that NOT ONE PERSON has decided to play this game based on. Also, the forums quickly become even more about whining about 1v1 balance. (Irony is though, in this particular game, 1v1 is actually kind of important since they’ve decided to make 3 flag conquest maps for 5v5!)

And they almost always, when things quiet down, add some sort of duel feature to shut the vocal minority up…. but it’s unlikely to happen very soon until they think WvW and PvP are playable.

The state of hot joins/scenario/battlegrounds/whatever and WvW is much more important to the overall health of the game than tournaments.

I know a lot of you have fantasies about this game becoming basically a MOBA or “e-sport” but let’s be real….right now probably 90% of the players giving them money are spending 90% of their time in PvE? That’s just a number pulled out of my rear end but I think it’s a good estimate.

Hot Joins and WvW are also one of the two paths of getting tournament players (the other is recruiting from HoN, LoL, etc) so you should probably be concerned if they are increasingly not fun if you want more tournament players?

It’s not just thieves, it’s every class to some degree.

Everybody must have tons of pets, teleports, escapes, CC and CC breakers…. it’s really totally a twitch action-reaction and run around game right now.

People who think it could be an e-sport as it is designed are kinda adorable. Sure, games like Starcraft are very similar in theory (basically twitch games where you memorize certain strategies and rotations?) but this is just not the MMO way and there’s a serious schizophrenic game design here.

If it wasn’t difficult to find and target Mesmers they’d barely be played. Clearly if it’s the only thing you are doing at the time you can probably figure out which is a clone fairly quickly… but you know, we’re talking real world and a game that should be able to support 10v10 fights and larger.

Everybody paying attention knows there’s way too much dodging, vanishing, annoying CC (mostly from siege) and pets everywhere and it’s why any fight bigger than “very small” degrades into soup and AE spam.

Why more content? All he seems to be asking for is a discounted version of the game for people who only want to PvP.

Which, yeah, isn’t going to happen. I think you’ve confused desire to have a MOBA-like mode and e-sport potential with wanting to promote THAT area of the game exclusively over the other things going on in the game….. If they had wanted to laser focus like that…they’d just have released a MOBA.

(Also, you seem to underestimate how much of the cost of the game is based on shared resources….since it’s all the same art, animations, class designs…90% of the game is shared between modes so I’m not sure why you think you’d get half off. )

Class balance is not made around “conquest”…. you’re giving them too much credit. If it was, and their goal was to promote group play, they’d not allow a system based often on solo bunkers and voice chat instead of actual group fighting over the flags?

Retaliation and skills like it are almost always bad game design. Things that make you look for key spell effects in the current effect soup or even worse..stare at people’s buff bars are awful design and UI/UX issues waiting to happen. (If the idea is to force people to make a choice they have to not only be aware of it, but actually have a choice…. stopping attacking somebody for example, is often not a realistic option in a larger size fight if you’d like to win?)

Yet, damage shields and triggered on X damage… they always end up being thrown in these games and people always want to defend them as “skillz”…great mystery of MMO life to me. I suspect people find them interesting in PvE ,so thats why they always show up.

It seems pretty unlikely to be bandwidth. The more information you can get about what’s going on at a glance the more able you are to implement strategies. It’s just good UI/UX and also they have some high hopes for spectator modes in the future?

Most other games featuring faction vs faction, RvR, whatever don’t have the issue because the factions looked different at a glance…

Having useful CC “ruins” makes a game less skillful by adding another type of strategy and level of complexity.

You sound like children when you declare everything you enjoy to be “skillful” and everything you don’t like to “remove the need for skill”. Nobody is buying it and it’s completely transparent.

CC, BTW, doesn’t necessarily mean losing control or complete control of a character. (Knockback, Snare, Root type effects). There’s actually a lot of CC in this game it’s just mostly ineffective like Healing because the game currently is mostly just about running around like chickens trying to execute your DPS rotations on targets. The only real CC use seems to be to stun or trap the target your currently assisting/bursting down.

Going to need a lot more depth if you want a competitive game that supports group vs group or larger fights.

Seems like they should be able to make fights at 5v5, 10v10 (or mysteriously 8v8), and WvWvW large scale at least entertaining and fun for most people. None of them seem particularly great right now, but mysteriously people’s here answer is that WvW doesn’t matter and they should remove 8v8.

Think you should be a little worried about how with this brand new ‘no-trinity’ paradigm they can’t even seem to support multiple types of PvP.

Honestly suspect without major changes, the ONLY PvP in the game is going to be arena style and WvWvW will feel mostly like PvE and appeal to some hardcore folks who really love that siege weaponry?

No MMO ever really tries to balance 1v1, because to do so just means your game’s classes are super boring, basically interchangeable, and have no strengths and weaknesses. But plenty of games have allowed dueling.

The idea that it’s important is pretty funny though. If you’ve played any games like this you know there is ALWAYS this super vocal “soloer” minority, and they’re always pretending like everybody in the game cares about 1v1 (they don’t) and that the game needs to be balanced for 1v1 combat (it doesn’t). It doesn’t matter how much the game goes out of it’s way to declare it is a team PvP or RvR/WvW game..they are always there whining for duels until they get them…then they whine about 1v1 balance.