Guild Wars 2

1. I like that suggestion, still doesnt deal with over active particle effects, but then that can be solved more directly.

2. Im not trying to be a kitten but the design philosophies of guild wars 2 have strangled PvP nearly to death, because these philosophies represent challanging demands for innovation and then provide insuficient resources to the development team to meet these demands.

IE

E-Sport.

Launches without:

Spectate
Ranked match making
Leaderboard
Fun gameplay

and just enough resources to produce buggy versions of these things a year after launch.

Except fun gameplay. That probably wont get adressed.

I have this idea… It requires other teams and big features but its a stated goal for anet anyways.

Impliment pet mini battles… pokemon, and have some of the pets be available only through pvp.

personally i vote for randrom drop, because the honor system has some flaws to it. grinding is rewarded and so are arena exploits. but if you go with glory buy then fine

I can alleviate two problems at once: The weird and hard to discern casting animations of asurans, and reduce the negative impact our overly glittery spell animations have, with about the same commitment of resources we would need to even begin addressing either problem independantly.

CASTING BARS.

There see? A simple icon with the skill name and some sort of ‘filling’ animation. If ‘filling’ is too precise and gives too much information, have a darkening opacity system that starts around 60 and slides to 100 with a quarter second linger after completion.

This might not completely solve these issues, but it’s a strong step in the right direction.

idk about all this stupid talk, but im pretty convinced there’s some inspector evil style plotting to make players hate the game.

sigh
/ 15 char

ya underwater combat was this unique idea anet had, and 1/2 implemented, and then just never polished. it’s permanently in early beta state

Corian.4068:

Errant Venture.9371:

Well HOT kitten , maybe they’re listening after all?

You really think so little of them that they’d just outright ignore something like guild halls and GvG? Don’t be insulting.

That said, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up either. That “dated from last year” thing in particular could mean this was or still is a shelved project. It’ll take time even if they’re actively working on it.

But like, they aren’t stupid. Don’t act like they are. They’re making decisions based on a whole lotta things we don’t know. You don’t have to agree with the decision but they aren’t sitting in a shadowy room going “yes, let’s make the players hate us by refusing to do things for them!”

C’mon.

Really? You dont think theres a large dark room with reclining leather chairs? Explain rallyingn and underwater combat.

the problem is that the gameplay isnt fun, and needs a thorough rework. Even the devs must secretly recognize this by now, but they havnt got the resources on the pvp team to actually undertake such a project (because pvp should have self evolving content and require a small team) — and anet wont seam to loan the ‘project’ team to PvP because nobody cares about PvP and anet would rather retain players that like their game than make good on their promises to deliver AAA esport PvP.

Business needs are trumping ethical game design in a company thats usually pretty kitten ed dedicated to ethical game design. I suspect there is a cancer somewhere near the top. Likely the same cancer that forced the game to launch when pvp was clearly noteven close to done, and who insisted on bad pvp gameplay decisions (but neat ideas, on paper it sounds fine) such as stomping… despite mass player feedback that it was bad.

new game modes are on the way but… no nod from anet to how gw2 has nothing to do with gw1, and even new game modes wont fix that.

pretty much not a game i would recomend to a fan of gw1, or of good pvp in general.

I even like to pretend I had something to do with smite, as I tinkered with an ele that spammed self buffs with ether renewal and so forth.

of course that small but obvious switch from self casting, in which you cannot give chase, to casting on a warrior…. really makes the build viable. dunno why i didnt see that one. woulda had another feather in my cap.

ALSO I used a hammer warrior with gale in 4v4 long before the koreans made that popular. … just sayin.

anyhow thats the end of my epic gw1 forest gump moments. all the rest was just fun gameplay and stuff… that gw2 lacks

God kitten I feel like the forest gump of Guild Wars now.

I was also with Embryo (FF) when he got an email back from anet (this is like, day 3 of open) saying that body blocking with spirits was a feature of the game and would not be considered an exploit. He explained this as we loaded onto a relic run… and thus was born the cheesiest FOTM Guild Wars would know until IWAY (which, sadly, I cant claim to have had anything to do with. Other than getting steam rolled by it the first time we saw it.)

Interestingly the patch which killed spirit spam was the patch that made blood spike plausible. edit spirit walling, spamming still happened, and was the key to BS

iQ did have some players join over. One of my buddies was with em, I think Ensign was too.

They mostly quit like 90 days after launch.

it was War Machine I’m talking about yes. (MEN) was by no means a big time guild. We enjoyed being on the front page (top 20) for the first week or so of a season once, that was the highlight of our success. we took a dive to like, page 3 immediatelt there after.

I was playing one of the monks, so my account might be a bit rusty here, but as I recall the premise of the ‘cheese’ was to use the maguma jungle guild hall, and use (1 or 2?) warriors to body block the first enemy bridge. This prevented them from getting to work on your NPCs properly prior to VoD and so ensured a victory. Out leader watched WM use the tactic in spectate and then got excited and had us all que (we also ran triple war, and on that map.) He never thought we’d actually match off against WM.

Anyways WM wasnt taking us too seriously, which befit our actual skill. They played too aggressive and we used the body block tactic. We were getting our butts whooped by VoD but the gimmic worked and we pulled off a win. I dont recall if that got us in the top 20 or kept us there for longer than we belonged, but it was a hell of a ride.

I wasnt, nor was my guild, famous or pro. I like to think we were pretty good for non famous people, we did brush shoulders with them some. I did a halls run with star, evils monk once.

Speaking of blood spike though, I am the origional author of that build. Well coauthor, the concept was mine but my buddy helped shape it before we took it live.

builds which require the strategic use of all (minimum) 11 skills are too hard. Havnt you read das forum? The game is too hard thats whats driving people away, how hard it is to play this game.

Wait did they change something to make ‘sniper’ viable?

last i checked this game rolled with 30% of your skills being gap closers like teleports and kitten. so things like ‘lines of combat’ and ‘positioning’ didn’t punish players for being bad and making mistakes.

Oh but the pvp does suck, and thats what i bought the game for… so this is still a whine thread, incase there was any confusion after all that praise.

World of Tyria sounds good to me, I havnt got much against the PvE. I mean it’s a little overeasy but hey, thats the industry trend.

The environment is truly awesome, I give some kudos to their art department.

Though about the lore… there was a bunch of habub about how Sylvari were a truly unique race. Presumably Asura were too obvious a throw to tinker Gnomes to be graced with similar compliments.

…

Dryads? Am I the only one who thinks there’s a pretty solid link there? As solid as the whole tinker Gnome thing? Also have they revealed wether the Pale tree is a dragon champion or whatever that went rogue? I was almost a little curious about that part of the plot – which marks the first time ive given a kitten about the lore of an MMO. I guess that makes this one more RPG

we (MEN) Gomen Nasai actually took a match off WM once. probably the pinnacle of my time in gw1. Totally only happened because they didnt take us serious enough, and we used their own cheesey tactic against them. Still, a win against that team was a win, and an epic one for us!

Motoko.2875:

FoopOplo.7914:

No offense taken. I’ve heard of War Machine. Much more into the WvW scene if I recall correctly.

I’ve got nothing against WvW or even some GvG matches in the borderlands. However, there is a great deal of skill involved in sPvP, and in my personal opinion I’d say a bit more. 1 person in sPvP will make or break a fight. You can be carried through GvG fights much easier.

To each their own though. I suppose if sPvP isn’t your style, perhaps you shouldn’t have clicked “pvp” when you get onto the forums.

Once again, congrats to Denial!

He was referrencing GW1 GvG.

My god. Why why why…

HAHA… yea… I get that feeling a lot too.

Motoko.2875:

GW2 PvP too *boring for MMORPG folks

Fixed.

The mass exodus of the high-end competition wasn’t because the game was “too hard”.

It was because the PvP was stale, lame, and a huge step backwords from its predecessor.

Calling GW2 PvP an eSport is like calling Kim Kardashian a celebrity. Its just sad.

Best post this month on the entire forum

oooh oooh, sacrifice ‘fun’ foe downed state and stomps

gets more viewers

I like this definition for esport:

someone out there is paid a living wage just to practice and be good at the game. aka a professional.

noun
“A published, broadcast, or recorded work that continues the story or develops the theme of an earlier one.”

so… guild wars 1 pvp… has no sequel. Guild Wars 2, is a missnomer,

noun
“A wrong or innacurate name or designation”

because pvp in gw2 has no story, unlike gw1… so nothing is continued, thankfully… and the theme is completely different, with no spiritual succession whatsoever.

am I right? I feel right.

obviously the mature ones post on the forums instead of playing… im sure that the kittens per post are lower in pvp than any other forum…

except our very own pvp community moderator posted a kitten when the use of the letters ‘st’ were appropriately filtered out of her post! Allie!

about that vicious circle:

Allie I have more fun complaining about this game than playing it.

But I suppose we should try to fix it, so here are my pro tips:

Make players have the pvp page open and then imbed a stream of a twitch channel… count them all as viewers.

Then dedicate some of your servers to running zen and havinf xfire accounts linked to gw2 and playing ridiculous hours…

pretty soon you’ll convince investors that your game is the most popular in ze world!

boots to fill…

one more task for evan, since you know anet wont send him help from the ‘projects’ team, ever.

when people get nostalgic about gw1, it tends to be about the early campaigns, particularly prophecies. as expansions came out, the quality and community dwindled as i saw it.

so those who came late to gw1 and dont understand, thats why.

dota2?

The lack of good games these last few years has probably driven them all to get lives

Hi all, I keep seeing this, and similar arguments crop up. I don’t really disagree with them but I have some thoughts I’d like to share.

1) GW2 launched with better support for pvp than most MMOs. This… is… true, Im pretty sure. But it also launched with a lot less than guild wars 1 did, and a lot less than it was hyped to contain. I guess it’s a glass half full or empty kinda thing.

2) Best PvP of an MMO… I’m not sure about this but it wouldnt surprise me. It just hasnt got the best PvP of any mmo ever. GW1 had better tpvp before anet expanded it into bad, and DAoC had Realm vs Realm, which was a lot better than WvWvW. So again, half empty half full.

At any rate, I guess to us old timers who view the past with some slightly unfair nostalgia (lets face it no video game will excite me as much as it did back then.) GW2 is lacking. In my defense, it aint all nostalgia, gw 2 really doesnt measure up to it’s predecessor as an esport or whatever, as just fun.

BUT for the current generation of games, I suppose it’ll do. I sort of wonder,

once upon a time, to become a game designer you had to be a pretty handy programmer. Now it seems game designers are the kids who washed out of programming because math was too hard. Maybe that’s why games just arent what they used to be?

Ah well, academic, and some game designers just love game design, and some programmers just love code.

Remeber…

na, i havnt been very active since beta. I have been playing video games for several years, however. When I take the time to commit to a game I’m pretty consistently in the uper 5-10% of it’s player base. Not pro level, but good enough. (that means in a pub of 20 people I’d be 1st or 2nd best, but then sometimes 3rd or 4th. Depends on the crowd.)

I can confidently say that gw2 is easy to play.

its k, buff to conjured bow will be remove deep freeze and give us heal arrow, needs more support skillz.

anet knows what we need

o and nerf staff ele again too, still OP

Lordrosicky.5813:

Allie Murdock.8152:

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.

See this is the thing that concerns a very large proportion of pvpers. Different views everyone has, but when you agree with this sort of thing it is worrying. Things aren’t good. It would be nice if anet admitted this. The leaderboards are broken and don’t count as a feature. You dont say this. Skyhammer has a lot of bugs. You dont say that you see this. Matchmaking has issues. You dont say that you see this.

The idea that you have added alot and we should be grateful is fine. We should be grateful. It is a great game you guys has produced. But please, for the love of god, someone at anet needs to come out and say “look we know leaderboards arent working right now – this is what we want to change” or “we know this isnt working”.

You seem to slap urselves on the back for all the features added but they arent added at a level that is acceptable to us in a released game. It needs to work, and if it doesnt work (like most features dont – like spectator not being available to tournies too) then you need to come out and say you know it doesnt work. Because to the us it seems like anet are just burying their heads in the sand.

Its a great game so well done. We know this. That is why we are here. But come out and say you recognise the flaws in the things you have added. It is painful not knowing if you will fix this stuff because it doesnt seem like you think there is a problem

its really not a great game. not the pvp anyway. they dont deserve a pat on the back, not collectively.

some of them probably worked hard and deserve recognition.

the final product is awful though, and fell so far short of promises and expectations.

aza is right. u r wrong in this

NevirSayDie.6235:

tronjeremy.5820:

Show me a post that has improved the community and has had a real result in change of anykind for spvp.

How about all the ones pushing for a dedicated solo queue? Many of them were well-reasoned and constructive—GW2 PvP has an emphasis on positioning so premades have a large advantage over pug, lack of meaningful leaderboard without solo/premade split, etc. A few of them became hateful or bitter, but most remained calm while making a good case for PvP dev priority.

Implementing a dedicated solo queue was a huge step in the right direction (I’m not afraid to be honest—yes, it should have been in at launch, but the game released a bit early for the PvP side). It was accomplished through reasonable people making reasonable posts about what would changes would be reasonable for the devs to focus on first. These days, it seems all we post is “re-design PvP from the ground up!” and “the devs hate my profession!” Both of those are unreasonable and unconstructive.

ok posts asking for features standard to the industry, that the game should not have launched without don’t really count. You even admit that.

The truth is that the gameplay has always been crap and the devs have always kicked those who have suggested major changes, even in alpha.

Here we are today with a crap game, and the devs cant fix any of the issues because

1) Theyre too deep
2) The PvP team is tiny, because its size was dictated by the theory that PvP requires little maintainance once a meta cycle starts rolling
3) anet doesnt seem to be re-enforcing its pvp team as they strugle to impliment fundamental features that should have been in sooner. The pvp team cant fix the game when they havnt finished the game yet. You cant properly balance when youre still in early beta, and with no match make, solo que, spectator, leader boards etc, thats where they were.

i think the combat is meh and the game sucks. they should look to gw1 prophecies and ask themselves “why are we trying to be so different from success? why are we trying to prove were savant innovators when were really not, and a good working model exists.”

then they should put a z axis and updated graphics on gw 1 and patch balancing every 3 months or so.

im not hating on innovation, but… if you’re not a genius, you should follow your wagon into anothers ruts. You may not go anywhere new or make history, but you will arive safetly. It is better to be unknown than known as a failure.

GENTLEMEN:

Y we fighting over who got an invite to the … Minnisota regional milk carton derby finals?

Really this game has about the same following, y care?

you know… gw1 had…

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

you know guildwars 1 had……. aw forget it..

lol yea. sigh

guys gw2 pvp sucks donkey balls. anet should probably make it fun first, else we’ll just see people play to grind out the gear they want.

sadly i’d bet anet impliments this and then pats themselves on the back for improving pvp play numbers. not realizing theyve still failed the goal of making a fun game but instead merely harnessed the human desire to earn stuff and feel special.

you know ive enjoyed games that were about robust characters supporting eachother somewhat. GW2 just isnt very good in that field. Smite comes to mind as a very similar game thats just a lot more fun to play.

i tried gw2 pvp when it came out for several months and it just wasnt fun. thats when i got nostalgic and asked where the gw1 inspiration was at.

personally, i feel like if theyre going to change the games genre, they should have said something in the releases. i feel like this was false advertising. i ordered steak and got salmon, and to be blunt it was a pretty kittening gross salmon at that.

ya i dont enjoy gw2 pvp much, but the ele is the only class upon which i enjoy it at all.

staff ele really is the most fun of all, but there are some builds you just cannot beat with it. thankfully those builds usually cannot beat you either.

there was a comment pre beta about how their design was trying to move away from the cast bar and instead have clear character animations.

…

but then they also said pvp would be balanced seperately, and that wed be AAA esport pvp, but then launched with no match making or spectating. so…. :/

classic guild wars was this:

Your team captain built a deck, he said these players will bring these skills with at least this attribute allocation. Sometimes they defined every detail, sometimes they left some slots open. The team worked together with one or more ‘plays’ they could make. That is a pattern in which different players could unload different skills inorder to have a powerful effect on the enemy team.

Lets take an example, my favorite build was classic singles smite. It was somewhat overpowered and eventually was nerfed, which is all well and fine.
Your ele/mo ran zealots whatever, some prot skill ive forgotten, and ether renewal. The other skills were open, but we usually saw a couple of smite magic nukes, balthazars aura i think, a glyph and maybe an aegis. Double melee, gale hammer warrior was my favorite, of course this was before the gale nerf and subsequent shift to shock in the meta. Also hammer instead of axe cause thats how i rolled, but we usually let our warriors choose. a degen / corpse control necro was another slot. had to have corpse explosion, if they were super cool theyd use glyph of sacrifice and well of the profane, but that was far from reliable. feint heartedness and parasidic bonds.

those were your 4 ‘offense’ and the youd have 3 defense and one interupt, who could do whatever was needed. or in my case, another elementalist who brought ward v foes and ward v melee.

come to think of it, the only two robust and well rounded character slots in that team were the warriors. nobody else brought 5 single target damages and a self heal. maybe if you had a cs ranger in that interupt slot.

the point is, the team was a deck, and when it faced other decks it had to identify that decks win condition and defend it, then it had to identify a win condition of its own and execute it.

in gw2 you just have a bunch of people brawling until someone goes down, then theres some team coordination about stability and boon removal for a few moments. The combos never get much bigger than two people on each team helping one another.

the builds arent intricate, no codependancy exists. its like a first person shooter or something, but without the aiming… which it turns out is sorta a big part of the fun in those games.

ya well, for a game that’s trying to do pvp this one really sucks at it. hard.

conditions / hexes / enchantments / boons got a lot worse from gw1 to 2. like, spam and auto remove instead of decide.

dodging isnt really a big ‘fun’ mechanic whatever the devs may tell themselves.

the game is cluttered with ai

crowd control was perfect in gw1, in gw2 we see the whole ‘loss of control’ thing creepingin.

downed states and rallying isnt actually fun for either side. i guess its easy to watch? basically its a big o’l ‘do you havestability? does the other guy have boon removal?’

basically, they took the best mmo pvp. tried really hard to make something better while taking nothing from the origional — failed, and now suck.

I remember the devs promised this, but it seems to be taken for granted in forums more and more that some skill tweek in one would change the other.

are we walking away from this two spheres thing? Because that was a good idea, to balance them seperately. can a dev comment to confirm they still recognize that as a potential tool? we havnt seen it used much.

Iason Evan.3806:

ryston.7640:

1. Make gameplay fun
2. people will come. this game is f2p, and a lot of idle accounts, like mine, enjoyed gw1 so much that they just lurk the forums and loggin once a month to see. I have 6 friends who quit this game (several after asking me wtf for the bad referal) that would come back if the gameplay got good.
3. Twitch views would go up and that would draw more in.

fix the game

do a short ad campaign

done

“Make it fun” isn’t really a suggestion that carries any weight though. What do you think it needs to be fun? Explain that and you are on to something.

I thought of another thing. Give players stacks of Defiance. Give it a 2 minute cool down even after death and then it gets reapplied. Without a healer, it’s WAY to easy to focus targets when outnumbering opponents. Defiance would give teams a way to either make it over to allies in time for a save against 3+ players, or run. CC is king in sPvP and there is a reason. Skills all get balanced because of pvp and yet bosses get defiance rendering CC in PvE moot. Add the mechanic to PvP.

1. Youre right, it is vague of me. Making the game fun is an important step a lot of people are skipping, they jump right to rewards and drawing people in… into what will really just be a grind for gear. I leave it vague because I dont want someone to get hung up on a detail of my proposed method and walk over this important step. suffice to say, the game isnt fun yet.

2. Instead of defiance lets just balance PvE and PvP seperately, that was the origional promise from the devs anyways. what makes good pvp gameplay doesnt equate with what makes good pve. just doesnt, so why shackle the two together?

Rewards to draw people into bad PvP isn’t the solution.

First they need to make gameplay fun, then they can worry about bringing people in and fixing balance. The gameplay still isnt fun yet.

Well, Ive seen Devs address issues discussed on the forum since day 1.

Im not sure if they listened but there was even an epic moment when I asked for clarification of the class roles so we as a forum could discuss class balance in a more constructive manner, and it was given! … my hopes for a shift in discourse were not, so I feel a little bad for that prediction.

The devs have always read the forums but I had seen them take very few ideas from us.

The question is: Does anet still aspire to AAA Esport, or have we thrown in the towel.

If weve given up then anet and this community can continue on.

If were trying to fix this though… we need to change.

First: We are no esport. The money in this project has drawn some attention, but our twitch viewership points to the truth of it. Truly. I think were losing to the sims right now. I know d3 is beating us by leaps and bounds, and that was the fail game of the decade. (apparently less fail than us though)

Second: The game needs deep and fundamental changes. The kind that mean PvP isnt linked to PvE for balancing. That was promised and talked about, have we abandoned that?

Third: If the devs nod to these two things, that they are still in it to win, and that they are willing to consider large scale changes independant of pve… than we the community need to be constructive and give them a round of good suggestions again. I think opperation tear down their egos so they listen has succeeded. we can stop… i think.

ha.

d3 has more twitch viewers than gw2

1. Make gameplay fun
2. people will come. this game is f2p, and a lot of idle accounts, like mine, enjoyed gw1 so much that they just lurk the forums and loggin once a month to see. I have 6 friends who quit this game (several after asking me wtf for the bad referal) that would come back if the gameplay got good.
3. Twitch views would go up and that would draw more in.

fix the game

do a short ad campaign

done