For anyone who has tried to play a melee class outside the US you will understand that your skills and counters don’t always go off in time even though you can telegraph the next move. Ever watched a melee spvp vid of someone from AUS? I haven’t. It’s for good reason, all you would see if a melee did a vid was ‘(chase target)miss, miss, miss, (target stop) hit, (chase target)(pull out ranged weapon)hit,hit,hit’. Classes don’t always play the same everywhere. Watch a thief vid of a US player and you will see how a limited skillset is used to look seriously OP. I have tried to spam on a Thief s/d 3 all I get is ‘miss miss’. Shadow step doesn’t always work. If it’s a melee skill with a cast time, you’re going to miss more then hit.
Personally I only play melee as normally in games ranged classes are stupidly more versatile, easy to be good at, tank better in cloth then someone in heavy armor can. Generally never really have any downsides to them. I like to feel a sense of accomplishment when defeating an easier to play class with their homing projectiles, bulk aoe damage, better heals and tank.
1/2 second cast time coupled with slow and sometimes rubber banding animations add an extra element of difficulty to gameplay as a melee outside of the US. Our only saving grace was quickness, but you nerfed that. It brought us on par with people ping 150-200ms lower then ours. Even if it was for 5 seconds.
Players from the US rarely venture onto AU/NZ fps game server because it really shows how lazy their reaction times are compared to ours. No one likes to get facerolled so they go back to their cushy <50ms. For anyone from AUS that used to play America’s Army back in the early 00’s. Running around with 200-300ms destroying players in the states with <50ms getting called a hacker was a fun time. We could use ‘suppressive fire’ or ‘pre-fire’ to counter our lag. We cannot do this in GW2 as the game mechanics do not allow it. Eventually they released the license to host a server and we could play in AUS. Everyone migrated over and never returned. It was a totally different game, kind of like when anet got rid of horrible culling.
There needs to some sort of compensation in the way of reduction of cast time for melee skills. But make it only for those outside the US, who’s avg response time is 4x, sometimes 8x longer then those inside the US. Make it opt in, link it by the credit card on the account, the origin of the IP, contact mobile number, the route which the packet took, random pings. Permaban those that want to exploit it inside the US. Give people a country icon next to their name to say where they are from.
OR
Lag everyone else out in the game to have the same client/server relationship as those with 200-300ms response time.
OR
Localized servers.
I did not touch on ranged because games like this have homing projectiles.
TL:DR
Response time compensation in spvp for melee classes for those outside the US.
Reduce cast time and/or speed up animations.
OR Lag everyone out to the level of the highest response time.
OR localized servers.
Make it an opt in, need to prove you are from outside the us.
I lost track of how many times we focused you down, then wiped the force. Those CoF shoulders make you stand out like a shiny loot bag!
