Curse

Terrible Surgeon · May 30, 2011, 08:17 AM // 08:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

Lolz such little way of viewing things. There is no "OP" classes in guild wars, what killed build creativity is anet ban hammering everything down to the point that your funneled into 1 or 2 directions. Removing build creativity in guild wars 2 revolves around 2 mind sets - 1. players are stupid, 2. the most vocal of the "top tier" pvp'ers will rather people mash into each other with the exact same skills, effectively turning guild wars into counter strike with spell cooldowns.

Ironically this is what drives most of the player base away from pvp at the gvg level, pvp in the old days was about the twitch elements vs the strategic elements, bringing a different build was just a part of the game as interrupting 1/4 cast times. Now its all twitch and execution rather than strategy and deck building. Not surprising ANet has 1 "organized" pvp arena in Guild Wars 2, the rest of pvp is just AB/RA wasteland.

Sad but you do have a point. I just think its funny Anet never could balance anything in GW. GW has always had balance issues and the people responsible for those issues have failed to address them. PvP is what gave guild wars a face in the gaming world, you would think Anet could improve pvp as they go instead of continuing the course they have been on for all of these years.
If the original gvgers got on and played now they would roll the current players because they just made a point of trying harder. They had a Meta then but they explored ways of breaking the Meta. Now we just run Meta.

*lemming* · May 30, 2011, 07:43 PM // 19:43

You're not accounting for people being better at recognizing what's good.

floor · May 31, 2011, 12:07 PM // 12:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terrible Surgeon

If the original gvgers got on and played now they would roll the current players because they just made a point of trying harder. They had a Meta then but they explored ways of breaking the Meta. Now we just run Meta.

If only this was true. Say what you like about old players being super awesome, but in reality the top players then are probably not a whole lot better than the top players now, if at all. All the "niche" tactics used back then have now become used mainstream, the game is 6 years old and there isnt rly a whole lot more people can learn. Even players at rank 2k realise the benefits of flag pushing and using armor > health now, this certainly wasnt always the case.

Also just as a case in point:
EviL came back --> peaked r300 ---> quit again.
vD recently played guru cup ---> got pooped on ---> quit again (i guested with them a few times whilst they were back, you could tell they were very smart players, but none of the tactics they employed were anything different to what rank 300 guilds do nowadays)

If those old players had continued to play right through for 6 years then yeah, most likely they would be the best players around now. As it happens though, many of the top players currently did not even start the game until 2007-2008, so naturally it took them till the later years of the game to become successful. There are still a few players around in top play who are oldschool, gold cape winners from 2006/7 or earlier, but the rest of the playerbase has just caught up in skill level. Either through starting the game later, or just being a slow learner, but its certainly not true that oldschool people could come back to guild wars now, and win a gold next month. Theres pretty much a maximum skill threshold in guild wars, thats almost impossible to pass, so once you reach it, other people just catch you up. (its probably fair to say though that this threshold got lowered somewhat as a result of powercreep)

TL;DR: In old guild wars, there were a lot more good guilds and players around, (a larger in game population obviously produces more skilled individuals) but like for like, the players then were not necessarily a lot better than the players now.

English Warrior · May 31, 2011, 01:12 PM // 13:12

There is always meta's in every game you see, there will always be comps that simply are better than others.

Terrible Surgeon · Jun 03, 2011, 05:46 AM // 05:46

yeah yeah im not crying for the older days. Im just saying it was a lot more competitive then and guilds tried a lot of different things to get a one up on the other guys. The last monthly championship was a Joke but it was not meta who won. I saw a good split team get raped by necros. It was the fastest monthly i've seen in a while too. Build wars is ok bc it breeds new thought. Stale meta is just how it sounds. Right Lem?

*lemming* · Jun 03, 2011, 06:20 AM // 06:20

I have no idea what I just read.

Terrible Surgeon · Jun 05, 2011, 10:38 PM // 22:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by lemming

I have no idea what I just read.

Im just saying that in the early years gvg teams practiced for hours. They had high skill levels and they knew several team builds. those team builds were meta. Then you get something like a necro pressure build that just blows all the meta builds away as in the last monthly. That team build might develop into a meta but it might also develop into something else or just disappear. point being, it was not meta and it won.

Reverend Dr · Jun 05, 2011, 11:36 PM // 23:36

You are deliberately ignoring the difference between ladder play and tournament play.

Terrible Surgeon · Jun 08, 2011, 05:44 AM // 05:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reverend Dr

You are deliberately ignoring the difference between ladder play and tournament play.

thats your opinion and this isnt just about gvg.

ShaJiexi · Jun 08, 2011, 06:16 AM // 06:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terrible Surgeon

Sad but you do have a point. I just think its funny Anet never could balance anything in GW. GW has always had balance issues and the people responsible for those issues have failed to address them. PvP is what gave guild wars a face in the gaming world, you would think Anet could improve pvp as they go instead of continuing the course they have been on for all of these years.
If the original gvgers got on and played now they would roll the current players because they just made a point of trying harder. They had a Meta then but they explored ways of breaking the Meta. Now we just run Meta.

Izzy was pretty damn good at his job. It is impossible for perfect "balance" to be achieved. In a rock-paper-scissors ladder, the meta will shift over time, since some builds are simply more effective relative to others. It's just the nature of the game. A build becomes dominant, a counter evolves, the counter becomes dominant, rinse and repeat. Updates tend to push the meta in whatever direction the devs want. For example, getting rid of VoD to prevent turtling.

Also, there were simply less options back then, fewer professions/skills to balance. Fortunately, metric shittons of skills are useless now (and an entire profession), so that makes it easier.

As to oldschool players....

That may be true of some of the Koreans, who pretty much memorized the terrain of every map and switched weapon sets for every single cast (looking at you, Soul Wedding), and kited adrenaline spikes on occasion. The top players were damn good, and some of them were better than most of what I see in ATs now. That's probably also because the stakes were higher- winning an AT!=going to Taipei and winning a couple grand. There are also some damn good players now, who are probably just as good as the best then.

Also, the ability to "break the meta" usually refers to creating a gimmick that can destroy most of the builds in the meta. This is usually called "unbalanced". A "balanced" game has a stable, slowly evolving meta, rather than a revolving door of FOTM builds. So, GW has gotten more balanced over time, I think. At least compared to before.

Killed u man · Jun 08, 2011, 09:38 AM // 09:38

Terrible Surgeon, there's no point trying to convince the GvG community that the old one was alot better.

And it's not that people nowadays lie all the time about them being better or just as good, they genuinly believe they're better/just as good. The main reason here being that the intire community kinda degenerated at the same time.In the days of rawr, for example, it was clear that they were alot better than most other guilds that played then.

So for the guilds that play nowadays, the story is quite different:

There is no amazing guild that keeps rolling them. Instead, what we see is the same 50 guilds in top 100 face eachother over and over and over again without any real hierarchy. As such, every top guild playing nowadays feels they're playing in a very competitive format, whereas in reality they're all playing at an equally degenerated skill level than that of let's say 4 years ago.

So the essence is:

If you have 2 amazing guilds with amazing players fight eachother, they both are going to feel like they're playing a very competitive game, which in this case is the truth. (Because by definition, they're amazing)

If you have 2 terrible guilds with terrible players fight eachother, they both are still going to believe they're playing a very competitive game, which in this case, however, isn't the truth.

But you should be able to understand how this illusion came to be over the years. Whereas player skill has severely degenerated, so has the opponent's. As a result, alot of players currently playing still believe they're amazing players facing amazing players.

But there's no point trying to reach out to them, I've tried, because admitting your playstyle is lacking is the first step to improving. (Which GvG teams haven't done in a long time)

Also, lol @ the evil and vD remarks.

EviL had half of their core playing (was it even half?) and they played redicilous builds. They tried sinsplits, honor balanced with gale windows, etc. They didn't adept to the massive powercreep and got rolled by gimmick builds. (not guilds) As a matter of fact, they still managed to plow over some top 50 teams using a terrible build and a 2-3 year break. I think they must've played a couple of matches of "build wars" and realized that it's just not fun getting forced to run certain builds to win.

They didn't leave cuz they were too bad, they left cuz they realized GW had changed, and adepting to that change at the cost of fun wasn't worth it to them.

I don't know vD's story, but it's not like vD was that amazing.

urania · Jun 08, 2011, 02:29 PM // 14:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by floor

vD recently played guru cup ---> got pooped on ---> quit again (i guested with them a few times whilst they were back, you could tell they were very smart players, but none of the tactics they employed were anything different to what rank 300 guilds do nowadays)

wait, where was [afk] when vD was on top?

RAing/HAing and some TAing.

floor · Jun 09, 2011, 10:07 AM // 10:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

wait, where was [afk] when vD was on top?

RAing/HAing and some TAing.

why the hate? And actually none of the above, i only started guild wars in mid 2007, so about the time vD was really dominating. As such i looked up to them the most as a role model i suppose. They were nothing short of awesome, and i dont think anything i posted suggests otherwise. But that does not change the fact that old school players who quit some time ago, are not automatically 20x better than the current top tier players.

Players who started the game in 2005, and were good in 2007, is similar in some ways to players who start in 2008 and are good in 2010. Admittedly the game has gotten less competitive, but thats not particularly because the top teams are worse, but more that there are simply less top teams because the critical mass of players is about only about 10% of what it used to be. There are very few competent teams at present who fail to make top 16 in the mat, whereas in times gone by even winning a poop cape was considered an achievement to some extent.

Making a direct comparison and saying that old players are better is impossible to make because the game was entirely different. GW was more demanding between 2005-2007 certainly, but primarily due to the effects of bad balancing the game now revolves less around team co-ordination to get stuff done. The fact that current players do not have to co-ordinate as much as old players does not mean that they cant or could not of learned to do so if they actually played the game back then.

As a case in point there are still a few players around in top 20, who were top players back in 2006-2007, im not gonna name anyone specifically but they are not significantly (if at all) better than the new breed of players. The fact is that there is pretty much a maximum skill threshold that u cannot go through, once u reach it, other players just catch you up.

But more simply the point i tried to make was merely that what was once considered game breaking strategy has now become relatively common knowledge. Thats just an obvious truth that as the duration since the game has been released increases, the amount of knowledge that players have also increases, either through playing the game for longer or by using the endless supply of online learning resources that appear throughout a games lifetime.

urania · Jun 09, 2011, 10:30 AM // 10:30

honestly, players bred in the last 2 years wont ever have the same level of insight and tactical knowledge as those bred 5+ years ago.

floor · Jun 09, 2011, 10:57 AM // 10:57

By "bred" i am presuming u mean got into the higher tiers of the game, rather than actually buying gw and just starting the game. Because there are a good few guilds and players who were relatively unheard of pre-2009 who are very very good at the game.

There are also players at present who were really good in 2005-2007 (silver + gold cape winners) who still play, who are definitely no better than the new generation of players around them.

I'll agree with you in principle, the average top player was better back then, but i think ur above statement is very generalised.

Killed u man · Jun 09, 2011, 11:13 AM // 11:13

Well, I personally generalize everything. There's no point typing: "Except a few" every single sentence. Whenever I post and I don't explicitely mention, EVERYONE (high stress) I usually just mean the large part.

Also, the difference isn't that big, but it's big enough that it were possible for current guilds to fight 2006 guilds, 2006 guilds would win 95% of the time.

Thier mircro was better, their knowledge of the game was better (There's still people arguing an intire bar built around Illusion of Pain is good) and their tactics were better.

They had amazing timing (Rawr in particular was known for this) and there were far few players getting carried back then, whereas nowadays every guild has got atleast 4 people that are getting carried, because on their own they'dd barely reach top 100. (If they were to lead the guild)

I'm also not blaming the current community. When there is no competition, it's hard to improve because you have no way of measuring yourself and your employed tactics. Nontheless, there's no point denying it.

floor · Jun 09, 2011, 11:29 AM // 11:29

u still manage to entirely miss the point of that illusion of pain bar borat. im not sure how most other people can see it except you?

The bar is probably about as versatile as u could get, self cripple remove, self heal, damage + degen from IoP, snares, interupts (also gives KD), and a res sig!

You are correct that illusion of pain alone "should" not kill someone, but when the other team makes a mistake it "will" solo someone. And since you are operating in a heavy split build, the other team will usually make positional mistakes at some point whilst trying to follow your damage about. Combined with the snares which can basically perma snare a flagger (you will in fact kill solo a char running the flag unless they send help back) the bar is extremely effective.

I dont see how u can think otherwise, if you could make a more versatile split bar that fulfills all the same functionality then i'd love to see it. Considering IoP provides very heavy degen AND damage in a single skill slot, allowing for the flexibility on the rest of the bar, i doubt you would be able to provide a suitable replacement.

Killed u man · Jun 09, 2011, 03:01 PM // 15:01

A blood necro.

floor · Jun 09, 2011, 04:31 PM // 16:31

just no.

reasons why:
a)A blood necro takes longer to kill npc's, specifically archers and knights cos of their self heals, than a mesmer due to having no interupt.
b) necro has no speed buff
c) necro has no damage, only degen. IoP is both.
d) necro has either 1 snare or 0. Mesmer has 2.
e) necro has no cripple remove

The necro is a far superior stand team character to the mesmer for obvious reasons, but the mesmers utility is what makes the bar so good, the necro doesnt provide even half the OFFENSIVE capabilities of the mesmer. Although i have to concede that as a defensive split character, the necro is extremely efficient.

ErrantVenture · Jun 09, 2011, 06:20 PM // 18:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Killed u man

A blood necro.

You realize that the IoP bar is designed specifically to kill blood necros and rit flaggers right?