Guild Wars 2

I always feel a little bad when I post a video from 2011 which has the exact same discussions that we’re having in SOTG now.

Travee.8492:

I normally don’t post here, but here it goes:

Please give us the option to turn off titles.

~ Travee

You mean, like, selecting “no title”?

Kavia.8249:

Bump b/c people on first page still asking about this

I’d delete my topic if I could.
Sounds like the leaderboards won’t be viewable in game

gwawer.9805:

may just be a reset

Why would they reset it?
Why wouldn’t they say that it was reset instead of “it will start recording”?
What was wrong with mmr?

During SOTG they said that players were in roughly the mmr they ‘should’ be at, why would they undo all of that if they didn’t mention anything about team and solo mmr? Rest assured, if they had made solo and team mmr then we would’ve had a post aboot it.

Maybe a dev could be so kind as to tell me that the patch notes aren’t accurately representing the present status of pvp mmr.

Does “leaderboards begin recording data on March 26th.” mean what I think it means? Because it certainly looks like everyone who said that the hidden mmr was a farce was right.

chrisk.4320:

They can buff warriors in other ways that doesn’t involve a skillless playstyle.

Warriors will always appear to have a skill-free playstyle because they are completely one dimensional in their approaches; they run up to you and hit you with metal. Other classes get quickness without taking increased damage but I don’t see as much complaining about them being too easy to play.

Lordrosicky.5813:

punish over extending.

If you could please expand on the concept of over extending in gw2, that’d be appreciated.
The way i see it, with circular objectives and aoe ridden combat, there are two positions – in the mess and out of the mess.

PowerBottom.5796:

- GW2 is set around longer fights and has excellent mechanics (like dodgeing), why would you let that slip through your Fingers with a Game-Mode where you could just sit behind Creeps, being guarded by a Tower, so no1 could attack you in the first Part of the Game?

Gw2 having long fights only happens when/because you can devote all but 10 of your trait points to not dying and it isn’t a full teamfight. Damage occurs in such enormous bursts and with plenty of aoe that most big fights don’t last particularly long because the only defensive tool you have available to you is to defeat your enemy.

Also, calling dodging an excellent mechanic is a bit much. My problem with it is that some traited dodge effects are way better than others and as a result, with vigor and energy sigils, you spend half your time rolling around being immune to damage while activating an ability.

Skyro.3108:

Balance is something that should be left to the devs since they have the raw data. I’m not sure why there isn’t a test server though.

I’m going to forcibly lay some common sense on you. That’s right, I’m gonna meow up in that kitten without any purring consent.

The devs have a responsibility to the game as a whole, because of this they can’t make big boy changes to pvp. Assuming that it is impossible to separate skills into pvp/pve versions the biggest thing to note is that there isn’t anything which will be bad for pve that comes as a result of pvp changes. Sure, maybe glitching dungeons would take a little longer, but ultimately you can use just about anything in pve and get through the content. So, we’ve discovered that being worried about how pvp changes will impact pve is stupid, but we’re still left with the problem that devs can’t change the game that way because of a higher power. Thems be some tied up hands behind some backs.

Now let us untie the hands of the devs by allowing community generated content. Maybe the content wouldn’t happen all that fast and maybe it would have to be a collective effort, but the devs could work on balance under the guise of community generated content and not have to do some Quasimodo version of balance. Or some paragon of balance would emerge from the rubble of our community and accomplish that.

Varonth.5830:

A matter of reading and alot of manpower.
Just think about how many new posts are added while a bunch of devs read one post.
They would never stop reading unless they skip alot of these posts (that’s btw a reason ANet and other huge companies have community teams just to dig through all this).

If you add a PTS people expect that everything they post and suggest will be added before patch release. Which would be impossible. It is already impossible to keep up with the amount of posts added, how should they find a way to implement every single suggestion, especially with alot of suggestions probably being the complete opposites.
Count each oppinion, and which side had more voices gets implemented? So a troll-runned game, yes?

So you’re saying there’s absolutely no way to filter posts? Surely by now anet has figured out which posters on this forum they like and which they don’t. Some people on this forum rarely post anything other than antagonizing one liners and rhetoric to allude to some kind of superior understanding of the game. I’m also absolutely certain that the devs have the capacity to decipher which tl;dr posts have merit and identify useful discussion. We can safely assume that such a small community isn’t causing them problems in the manpower department. especially when acting like each post here is worth reading is wrong.

Honestly, I didn’t care about a PTS before I heard some suspect conclusions being drawn from their internal testing. Now I just wish that pvp had been released with some kind of custom map design engine.

Varonth.5830:

Seriously, they won’t have the manpowerer to find those few gems posted on new changes under the pile of troll posts and just plain wrong informations (intented or unintented wrong informations).

At least that’s just a matter of reading. I find the results of their “internal testing” to be extremely suspect most of the time.

swinsk.6410:

I heard certain things that were salvaged gave tiger tokens but I haven’t gotten any from the priory/vigil hammers. (bug or not IDK)

I’m level 35, almost 36, so 40 isn’t too far away.

You think that not receiving a token from a higher rank is…a bug?
That business was an exploit and it sounds like it got fixed.

And 40 is too far away.

Nabisco Cookie.6539:

The two big things that they should really bring back though is HA, this would also allow GW2 to give PvE type rewards to those who are mostly in PvP . In addition, bring back GvG!

Conceptually, HA should be brought back. You know, the whole winning favor of the gods and defeating the scourge that is Europe for great justice thing.

However, I had hoped it would be obvious that with the combat being so different and one dimensional it would be impossible to bring back the exact same game modes without a complete overhaul in pvp design philosophy.

Also; people should really stop asking for pve rewards in pvp – it will never happen. Ever. EVER.

ensoriki.5789:

milo.6942:

btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.

Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy.

Yes, good builds did have energy management, but if you spammed your buttons you would still run out of energy. Also; monks and warriors didn’t have energy management, so they had to be particularly smart about when they used buttons.

Technically Helseth is right, gw1 wasn’t an esport outside of the world championships. Gw1 did have a lot of components for esport which gw2 doesn’t have, in particular it had easy to read combat which made the game pretty easy to understand/spectate outside of the 8v8 fights for the uninitiated.

milo.6942:

I think removing energy was a net loss. it was an interesting idea

It wasn’t really a design idea.
There was energy, and at some point they just realized that the gameplay wouldn’t be any different if it were removed, probably because there was no way to deny energy and builds had good enough energy management that you never ran dry.

milo.6942:

agree with most everything you said. “big numbers” is however a non-issue I feel.

You’re right. It was my intention to show the mindset of a developer catering for what pvers like, not that we can fault them for that.

Varyag.3751:

What I don’t understand most is how they could get PvP so wrong this time around…

I see lots of comments like this, and my thought is always “you seriously don’t understand?”
Gw1 was built on a series of pvp principles; things like simple gear, small numbers, and a concept of build making which was an mmo analog to mtg.

What’s changed? Aw jeez, everything? We have big numbers in every category, poorly streamlined condition categories, no concept of energy management, hardly any concept of team build making and no ally healing other than downed state. No ally healing changes response types. The closest thing we have to gvg in gw2 is foefire map, in which the lord pit is so lethal that you can send any one character to get in there and hold off 2 or 3 characters – there’s one response and it’s the exact same every time. OH! AND ELITE SKILLS! Yeah man, in gw1 elite skills just offered a tool or a refinement of playstyle, obviously that had to go because without having a button so strong that you receive a herculean surge in power pvers wouldn’t feel like big boys. The concept of effective skill use, as it was in gw1, is neutered. Sure, you might have a combo or some kind of burst potential with stuns/blowouts/knockdowns/redundant status, but there is no energy to be careful with.

Why did these changes occur? For pvers, if I hadn’t made that hypothesis clear already. Pvers in gw1 would constantly complain about how a max damage sword had stats which were like 12-21 or something. That does not make a pver feel like a cool kid! You also didn’t have huge aoe on every single class, very uncool! People were really elitist about what builds to run in gw1, so obviously the devs had to take matters into their own hands and choose the first 5 skills for people then give them 1 functioning elite and mostly bad utilities. Oh yeah, that previous sentence? Same reason energy was removed, because if the devs are making the builds you can’t punish players for the devs making bad builds.

For the record; I really want to like gw2 and I’m not anti change – it being inevitable and all. The fact that gw2 is not gw1 is used both as a complaint and a justification, which is messed up because a lot of good changes were made in gw1 and the knowledge from that just doesn’t seem to be present too often. Problem is that the engagements are so schizophrenic that the combat alternates between toughness-vitality nonsense and instant death. If Jon Peters thought that gw1 pvp was too hardcore ( http://www.guildmag.com/pvp-interview-with-jon-peters ) then what he helped build is so focused on deciphering non-distinctive skill animations, dodging, and twitch-like reflexes that it has to be way more hardcore than gw1 pvp ever was. At least the controls in gw1 didn’t represent a barrier to entry for pvp.

Gw1 had emotes which were based off of your guild’s ladder rank.
There were 4 or 5 split for groups in the top 200 – top1 had a special one.

If powerr wasn’t so busy being a coolkid he could just unrepresent the guild.
Honestly, he probably gets focused about the same as before – I think most people don’t care.

Jacobin.8509:

We already know about an alternate gamemode that works and isn’t TDM. Its called GvG and ArenaNet INVENTED it.

And how exactly would you transition gvg into gw2? All I can see is diminishing the game mode.

Gw1:
-make hard decisions about what skills to bring
-who brings heal skills for the team?
-who brings support skills?
-who brings resurrection skills? (Since death put you on a 2 minute timer)
-who runs flags? what skills do they bring for running flags?
-who defends base against a particular character?
-who responds when there’s multiple attackers in your base? Defensive response? Offensive?
-can your team run split tactics or do you have to fight honorable 8v8?
-can your team fight honorable 8v8 or do you have to run split tactics?
-running a team spike build? What kind of spike? Physical? Magic?
-running a team pressure build? What type of pressure? Hexes? Conditions? Edenial?
-running a cheesy build? What kind of cheese? Kappa spike? Bspike? SFway? Lord all in?
-what map are you running for your build?
-how do you change your build to be more flexible on many maps?

Gw2:
There isn’t the variety of skill options or responses, and as such most builds feel the same. You have a bunch of relatively self sustaining characters fighting a bunch of other relatively self sustaining characters. None of those characters can heal, so the only response option is offensive while also not changing the dynamic of the rest of your team. In gw1 if you respond offensively to someone in your base, that means your main team has less damage and has to play defensively. If you respond defensively then that means you have less support and you need to be killing stuff. That dynamic is gone.

The only capacity in which gw2 needs gvg is nominally.

slender.1482:

Precursors - Spark has reached 700g, The lover is almost 700g, Dawn/Dusk 600g, legend 700g. Why is there still no other option to acquiring these beyond pure luck.

Anet hired economists to consult.
These hacks are of the opinion that any expected reward must be account bound, so you can only trade things which come from chance.

Maybe we should have one.
Maybe it could be one of those fancy circles that changes color when bad things happen.

ensoriki.5789:

PowerBottom.5796:

Solution: Make secondary Objectives give more Points….

http://tumblr-gifs.com/pics/51.gif

Funny though how they said they were going to do that like 2 months ago…not happened.

Hence the thread (since the obvious solution has been implicitly dismissed by anet)

We all know how conquest can feel like a loss well before the game has actually ended which is almost certainly a product of the point system being a sum of small points over a long time. As a result, envisioning comebacks while in a match is difficult / daunting / requires a ton of patience (which conflicts with the pace of combat).

In a moba there’s a few factors which are taken into account when trying to decide which team is currently winning: map control / buildings destroyed and gold/key items on key characters. Those two facets of a moba aren’t boiled down into one score which dictates the outcome of the game (because they’re not directly linked to the win condition) so there’s some room for arguing and deciding where the advantage lies.

In gw2 there’s one metric by which you can compare the performance of two teams who are facing each other: the score. The only time when the score and winning the game don’t go hand in hand is if you’re playing on foefire and one team did a 5 man gank on the lord while the other team 3capped them. Unfortunately the team with the upper hand in this case is so obviously the 3capping team that there isn’t really much to be said.

Do we care? Are there solutions? Am I meowing out of my kittenbits? Team?

Kwll.1468:

Oni.5429:

This map is one of the few maps where bunkers arent that much of a problem in competitive play o_ó

Pro alert! I know more then you do! Well you are not quite saying that lol. Try solo queuing some time it might change your opinion on some things. You can’t expect this game to be balanced around the most competitive teams for one thing there are like 2 of them.

-He does solo queue
-It’s not about being condescending
-If players have found a way to handle a problem then it can’t be considered a problem

However, it’s worth noting that when the community is so small it’s hard to speculate on what all the possibilities are for balance since whatever meta there might be is heavily influenced by personal preferences – we just know that there exists a solution for something players are complaining aboot.

2/5 of the traits we have available serve no purpose other than to slow combat to a crawl – toughness and vitality (don’t those also normally give you boon duration?). All I know is that I think it’s stupid for someone to be able to dump almost all of their trait points into being boring.

Honestly, all areas should be like this so that all players can experience an active zone no matter where they go. I shouldn’t be surprised to see another player when I’m off doing noble quests.

Also; this is how the district system worked in gw1 for towns.

I’ve always wanted to see Zodiac armor.

Zodiac weapons were cool.
Tormented weapons were cool too..

Braxxus.2904:

you don’t understand the game enough to do simple things like force water attunement and follow up with a spike after the ele swaps out of water. Get good.

You’re probably going to want earth attunement to be on recharge as well.

There’s been some really good stuff said here, but the best way to internalize what these guys have said is to get some experience. Maybe you’ll lose some games and remember what someone said in this thread and it’ll click just like that.

My advice would just be to press the buttons that make you happy. Nobody on your team wants to play bunker? That’s fine, run around the map like you’re playing mario kart and look for power plays.

Above all else; be like the guy in my signature, I think we should all try to be like him.

Mrbig.8019:

In order to have good balance you have to create an environment where the SKILL factor is as even as possible, and where the only thing changing is team composition.

Query: is this saying that among players of equal skill many team compositions should be evenly matched?

ensoriki.5789:

It may also never come, hope that helps brah.

It doesn’t!
If you say that never is synonymous with occurring at t=infinity then it still counts as after the patch. You are the worst bamboozler ever.

Oni.5429:

I will lick your face one day.

And I will ignore the treachery and villainy of EU until this game has life enough to make the rivalry fun =3

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

About the ladder, they said it will come either earlier, on patch-day or shortly after.
At least according to what they said on last SotG.

So, let me get this straight…
It’s either going to be before patch day
or on patch day
or after patch day

Really narrowed it down, detective meowmeow.

Atlanis.6597:

When a single player joins a game, a message is displayed in party chat with a link to join that game. Just make sure that you join one with enough slots.

At which point it’s not guaranteed you’ll be on the same team unless you join a tournament roster together.

Obviously.
It doesn’t matter what server you join; if everyone is asleep then it won’t be busy.

shaolin.9716:

Although the happiness on game balance seems average

Speaking for myself; I think game balance doesn’t matter right now, and as such I’m neither =D or >=( about it. For the most part I die because someone came at me when my buttons were on recharge or I made some kind of mistake (maybe wrong place wrong time or maybe just pressing bad buttons at bad times).

2 servers per day
resets every day
yes

end thread

Join the world that’s best for wvw then use one of your free guest passes to go to the heart of the mists that’s more popular.

Starflame.5301:

Vena.8436:

The man who created GW1 PvP hasn’t been with ANet for years. .

Such a shame though

I was actually surprised that the devs tried to bring up MTG when talking about how they envisioned gw2 pvp working.
Gw1 was MTG in motion.
Gw2 is like mtg where you can pick the sideboard for a few premade decks, except the guy making the decks is a kittycat meow meow purr.

So I take it that the community is rather on the side of not using a real radar in order to compensate for maps which were designed to have poor vision?

jportell.2197:

Why not experience everything that you paid for?

This is a good time to actually think about how the game is planned.
Legendary weapons require the player to do everything which the game considers to be part of the experience.

You have to:
-Wvw for 500 badges of horror
-Do some dungeons a bunch of times
-Craft a bunch of stuff
-Be present during a dragon event
-Help all the residents of Tyria by vanquishing foes from every corner of the map
-Farm

You do not have to:
-play spvp

Therefore we can conclude that spvp is not considered part of the gw2 experience.

jportell.2197:

But what I am saying is that if the devs completely ignore balance issues at low level of play then these low level players will just stop playing and never attempt at tournies or even continue playing the game…

If low level players were exclusively matched against other low level players then this problem wouldn’t exist. You know what balance decision was made around low level players? Pistol whip thieves were nerfed because it was easy to use and bad players couldn’t figure out how to not die to it. I don’t think I know anyone who actually thought it needed to be nerfed.

jportell.2197:

The devs have also stated that they do not like to split skills between PvP and PvE imagine if warriors got an all around buff in the way of condition removal…

Finally you said something which is a bingo.

The pvp skills can’t easily be changed because of how they might impact the pve/wvw experience. Why? Because on the off-chance that Pve Paul and Wvw Winston decide to pvp the devs don’t want them to have to reread a single skill.

On which note I hope the following is obvious; Paul and Winston have made their choice. If they wanted to spvp then they would be playing spvp. Stop making people who don’t play the game mode a primary balance concern. What are you thinking?

Gems can never be rewarded as a prize for a tournament.
Anet policy is that anything which doesn’t come as a result of random chance must be account bound.
Rephrase: any reward that you can expect upon completion of a task must be account bound.

This will never change, although now that they’ve cemented this policy they can probably fire the in game economists.

Oni.5429:

mbh.8301:

Starflame.5301:

Well it was never fully alive in competitive terms. Unless I missed all those GW2 competitions and tournaments (and i don’t mean tPvP)

What are you talking about? The wall of champions has all the teams written down, but it’s just the same 5 guys winning over and over again so people don’t realize.

I tried 1v1ing Squad member 2 in a mesmer duel once. He beat me using nothing but scepter autoattack.

Right?

Obviously it’s a bit insulting that they’re the only ones who were invited to participate in the beta tournament, but it’s not like any of us stood a chance anyway.

Darnis.4056:

What I got from this ; People hated paid tournaments and loooooooooove hotjoin.

Paid tournaments had some kind of aura which made players feel like they couldn’t join solo like they did with the free tournament – which is ironic.

jportell.2197:

The quality of player or the value of their comments should not be dismissed because they press a different button than you. Some of us have lives.

A rabbit can only tell you about their experience as a new player.
Is this useful? Yes, it tells us a lot about why people aren’t playing.
Should it be used for balance decisions? …No? The game is hard to read and players have to constantly have their digits on a stun break or they’ll get thieved into little bits. If you think that balance input from all levels of the learning curve is a good idea then you just end up with schizophrenic balance changes which won’t approach any particular goal.

I don’t care if Hotjoin Harold comes in here with big opinions and ideas about game balance. There’s probably something to glean from what he’s saying, but what Harold says needs to be deciphered a bit since the relationship between mechanics is so convoluted that an inexperienced player probably won’t be able to identify it himself. Here we are demonizing Davinci so that his opinions can be discredited and make everyone feel like a special and unique little snowflake when it should be so obvious that Harold’s opinions are ill informed that I shouldn’t even have to waste internet on it.

Davinci was tactless and abrasive in his post, but when some guy starts a thread about a game mechanic before thinking about it long enough to figure out what purpose it serves then you might not want to be so quick to dismiss Davinci (loathsome as he may be).

Zinwrath.2049:

I dont know what purpose rally holds in spvp

The descriptions on the pie chart for “what’s most important” are too wordy and I had to do some master nerd sleuth work to figure out which bite was which.

Starflame.5301:

Well it was never fully alive in competitive terms. Unless I missed all those GW2 competitions and tournaments (and i don’t mean tPvP)

What are you talking about? The wall of champions has all the teams written down, but it’s just the same 5 guys winning over and over again so people don’t realize.

digitalghost.7891:

Earthacis.3862:

I agree and have been saying this for months. They need to make a separate free to play version for SPvP.

Before they do this though they need to actually release the features they keep talking about.

not sure if youre aware or not, but the entire game is f2p…

Free doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Also; anet would never allow someone to use their engine. If someone made the game popular then anet would look so stupid that it’s not worth it.

baerly.7204:

dont expect anything

Quoted for truth.

So what you’re saying is….it’s possible to lose 5v0

I find it difficult to identify if something is OP or not because I’m bad. Majority of the time I die because I made an oopsie and my opponent cut my head off.