Curse

Servant of Kali · Sep 25, 2007, 07:29 PM // 19:29

Yea, true. Poor Andrew

Be a bit nicer

I don't even know what exactly he does in ANet (besides PR) so won't blame him for anything right now.

I'd rather blame Izzy for skill balancing. And yes, I've seen Izzies comments on wiki too. They go something like this "I like Melandru so not going to nerf it. Yes it's better than almost all other Dervish elites, but I'm too lazy to buff those either, so I'll leave it like this, it's much less work when I have to think of only 1 Dervish skill".

On a sidenote, I'll repeat it - ANet made a great design of PvP. The support however has been so horrible that if I didn't see it, I wouldn't believe it. Also, I'm not even talking here about some major improvements or tweaks, such as redesigning HA concept, or something like reconnects. I'm talking about a lil good will, things that can be done with almost no time investment, but are not done because no one really cares.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blame the Monks

Pardon the OT, but if you are interested in a PvP focused game that has a vibrant, complex, and NONGRINDY crafting system, take a look at Pirates of the Burning Sea. The PvP has good depth and strategy, and the economy/pve is better than any game I have tried.

Pardon my OT as well. Anyway, I checked their website and the game seems great! Didn't play it yet, but I liked what I've read. Comments are legendary, finally some people who understand what fun means (yea I thought ANet understood too when I bought Prophecies but after Nightfall... eh).

Quotes are cool: "One thing's for sure: Errol Flynn was certainly never told to sail out to sea, kill 20 pirates-in-training, and return to the harbormaster for his 100 XP reward - nor does POTBS treat players this way."

or: "We're opposed to the idea of a 'treadmill'.."
or: "We wanted even the early ships and low levels to be useful and important. A cannonball is a cannonball, whether fired by a level 1 or level 50."
or: "Nobody plays WOW for the monster-killing.."

Saphrium · Sep 25, 2007, 08:07 PM // 20:07

The fundamental issue is, the more skills you have in player's hand, the more imbalanced the skill system is, the more pre-determined certainty there is, the more imbalanced the game system is.

Think for a second, if there is only one person with one skill, there will be a lot of imbalance local scale, but won't be any imbalance when observed from a global scale. Yet if you have 20 skills you have in your hand to tinker with, god knows how many gimmick build you can come up with.

The way to design the game I think, is more about how to balance luck vs. skill ratio than to calculate how balanced an extremely complex system. Think like magic the gathering, if one card is taken off, another will be put on, there is no all-cards-on-the-table-free-to-choose-anytime deal. Player controls how a card is played, but not how a card enters or exit the game table. Anet has done so with skills, but Anet has not applied the same principle with team-based PvP, it is why Guild Wars made Alliance Battle random and broken up into 4-player teams, because Anet lacks experience and ideas in this area, but then again more experienced than any other MMO venders I know.

In short, I think how much "game mechanic control" Guild Wars is giving its players is vital for how skill system balance would be perceived.

Anet needs someone with a sociology/psychology degree.

Blame the Monks · Sep 25, 2007, 08:43 PM // 20:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Servant of Kali

Pardon my OT as well. Anyway, I checked their website and the game seems great! Didn't play it yet, but I liked what I've read. Comments are legendary, finally some people who understand what fun means (yea I thought ANet understood too when I bought Prophecies but after Nightfall... eh).

Quotes are cool: "One thing's for sure: Errol Flynn was certainly never told to sail out to sea, kill 20 pirates-in-training, and return to the harbormaster for his 100 XP reward - nor does POTBS treat players this way."

or: "We're opposed to the idea of a 'treadmill'.."
or: "We wanted even the early ships and low levels to be useful and important. A cannonball is a cannonball, whether fired by a level 1 or level 50."
or: "Nobody plays WOW for the monster-killing.."

There is a really great devlog called "a case for a broader conception of pvp" or something like that that is an outstanding read. He makes a really good argument for setting up an economy that is fundamentally competitive and a form of pvp. Its great stuff. I also want to note they are talking about adding a form of GvG into PotBS, in addition to the open combat, realm vs realm, team vs team, and RA type arena pvp that they have now.

Sorry for the OT, back to bashing Gaile

Riotgear · Sep 25, 2007, 08:45 PM // 20:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by glountz

Remove teleport. It's actually a buff.
Increase energy cost to 10 and recharge to 15. To balance with Phantom pain.
The fact that it inflicts DW when <50% is quite powerful. It is really a finisher. I would also decrease its duration to 0....11...15 seconds. So either your spike lands or either it fails if Augury is not removed. Low specced Deadly arts people will be less able to take advantage of it.

10/1/15 unconditional deep wound that's a purple arrow until the instant it needs to be a brown arrow. Yes, that sounds like a terrific idea. Assassins already have a spike finisher, it's called Impale.

twicky_kid · Sep 25, 2007, 09:37 PM // 21:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nurse With Wound

You guys should seriously stop with personal attacks. As you know you're free to criticize everything on guru, but lets not make this personal. It doesn't serve any purpose, and its not helping. So please stop.

I don't take things personal. He's doing his job and I understand that. The way he phrased that was completely inappropriate for when your customers have a valid complaint (and many at that).

There used to be a time when every player would say "the devs listen to us and make changes based on our suggestions." How often do you hear that these days?

Instead of addressing these issues. You tell us instead of complaining we should tell you what to do. I thought we were telling you what to do? Let me know when this starts making sense.

Vital · Sep 25, 2007, 10:59 PM // 22:59

I'll buy GW2 if Anet sacks up and gets rid of the carebear BS and balance issues worse than a drunk peg leg with vertigo.

glountz · Sep 26, 2007, 08:30 AM // 08:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

10/1/15 unconditional deep wound that's a purple arrow until the instant it needs to be a brown arrow. Yes, that sounds like a terrific idea. Assassins already have a spike finisher, it's called Impale.

I dunno.
You seem to imply Augury of Death would be still "imbalanced" after the changes I propose.
But explain me why, so, Phantom Pain isn't so much used? Phantom pain deals the deep wound wether it is removed or not, and that is quite terrific for me. Augury can be removed easily through prevailing or quick hex removal, so there is generic counters to use, and if removed it doesn't apply the deep wound.
Augury can actually be spammed a lot thanks to its low recharge, fast casting time, and low energy cost. Increasing energy cost would seriously hamper spikes based on augury.
BTW, the expose defense nerf should have been an energy cost increase to 15. Such an energy cost would have completely hampered the ability of the sin to unleash its combo (25 energy just to cast expose+SP). He would still have been able to do it but at the cost of energy equipment, and inability to reuse it after being DPed.
I don't think I'm the best balancer here, but I try to compare to other skills before thinking a balance.
For Augury I used Phantom pain as a reference.
I don't think there is so much inherent "broken skills". Generally, tweaking the recharge, energy cost, or effect they do would be sufficient to "balance" them.

Xanthar · Sep 26, 2007, 08:42 AM // 08:42

For the benefit of Andrew: Criticizing your customers in any way is likely to result in backlash - Better not to post at all. Asking for input or providing information or opinion, however, is always appropriate. IMHO of course. Also, please inform your superiors that even though you are a nice guy, their policy of silence is hurting their potentials sells (see below).

As I said, I'll probably buy GW2 since - let's face it - GW1 was a fantastic game and kept me entertained for a long, long time. Still, there are things that need to be in place for ANet to be sure of my purchase. A number of answered questions really:

1. What is the level of support is ANet committed to when it comes to PvP play?

2. How does your business support your level of commitment to the PvP part of the game?

3. What systems will be in place to support competitive PvP? (ladders, cups, tournaments, third part support etc.)

4. How does ANet intend to avoid the following mistakes made in GW1:
a) Increased cost of entry into the game over time
b) Disconnect between PvP community and developers
c) Unfocused target audience and subsequent shifts in priorities
d) Introduction of play mechanics that fundamentally change the way the game is played

If ANet can answer those questions adequately, I'd say my purchase is pretty much a given. I am, depressingly, fairly sure that ANet is not willing to divulge any if this information. At best there will be loose statements such as "We want a thriving PvP community and will support it in GW2". If I'm wrong about this, I'd be a happy man!

Zabe · Sep 26, 2007, 08:57 AM // 08:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

I think you should probably wait for a bit more info before you start ruling out a game years away.

I think a more productive topic would be "what can ArenaNet improve for the PvP community to entice you to buy Guild Wars 2." It's a bit less doom and gloom, and could actually lead to positive changes.

You failed in GW1, why should any of us even try to estimate you wouldn't make even more epic failure of GW2.

Seriously, if in football Ronaldo, Zidane etc. top-players would have been quit the game because some rules or thing was broken in the game, what would FIFA do about it? I don't think they would just suck their thumbs in the office like you do.

Ado · Sep 26, 2007, 09:35 AM // 09:35

Anet is largely responsible for the current mess. But don't forget that the average age of pvp-players has dropped from about 20 years old to 15 years old.
With all respect to the younger audience, they have a totally different mentallity towards "how" to play pvp, than the more mature players. This had a huge impact on how pvp evolved over time.

Despozblehero · Sep 26, 2007, 09:45 AM // 09:45

Again attacking Andrew is not only pointless but completely the wrong place to place the blame... I doubt hes made any decisions on GW development...

A better place to place the blame as I like to imagine it is the Evil NCsoft CEO who sits in his black tower surrounded by dark clouds and crows and as he checks his How to ruin GW today Inbox, and as he reads his latest scheme he lets out a long cackle as lightning bolts strike in the backround highlighting his egg-shaped shadow across the room...;p

Zabe · Sep 26, 2007, 09:59 AM // 09:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Despozblehero

Again attacking Andrew is not only pointless but completely the wrong place to place the blame... I doubt hes made any decisions on GW development...

I agree on attacking against Andrew, or well, attacking against anything, ANet showed they don't care, pointless. But, as Gaile and Andrew are the ones giving answers here, you get a lot hate against them.

BlackSephir · Sep 26, 2007, 09:59 AM // 09:59

Hey peeps, how about little less hostility?

ayame ftw · Sep 26, 2007, 11:37 AM // 11:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Servant of Kali

Nah.
Didn't buy Gwen either.

It's not just about PvP... I bought the game for both PvE and PvP. I admit, they got me with "skill over time" advertisement. Grind in PvE increased drastically. And please spare me "you don't have to grind".. of course I don't have to, but then I miss a lot of game content so what exactly did I pay for, a demo version?

PvP on the other hand... leechers taking more than a year to deal with, and it's really a simple thing if there's a will. Heroes plaguing PvP. Almost non-existent skill balances (when a skill hasn't been used for 2yrs in any arena including PvE, and it still isn't buffed/tweaked, then yeah, that's not a balance) which means most of the skills are just dead weight to fill the quota of new chapter. Bad profession design, such as Paragon who has 80% of skills which can't be countered (shouts, chants, echos) and a primary attribute which contradicts game design.. and above all, no rewards for casual PvPers (no armor/weapon skins, fun items, etc.. nothing). Note: casual PvPers: 99,999 of PvP playerbase.

Absolutely nothing seen in these two years convinces me that suddenly GW2 will solve these problems. As a matter of fact, it seems to be WoW-clone.

wwooow that’s exactly how i feel, i couldn’t have put it any better

hyro yamaguchi · Sep 26, 2007, 12:08 PM // 12:08

It's not hostility versus Andrew at all, its hostility against Anet as a whole.

And we have every right to do so, after countless promises of improvement and listening to community feedback, all Guildwars did was getting more boredom and broken.

Everytime a so called improvement was made the vast majority of the PvP community tried is, and many gave feedback on the forum. Usually when such a change 'fixed' something, it just ended up getting worse than wat it was like.

What I said, in a now apparantly deleted message was that we shouldn't expect Andrew to respond again within half a year. Again: this wasn't against Andrew as a person, but against the ANet policy to respond and ask for feedback, and then completely ignore it and do something that is worse than the least intelligent suggestion made.

What they could do is just sit down for a few minutes and explain to us why they screwed up so royally, ask for feedback, sit down a few hours reading, and maybe ask some people who understand the game for help, and I swear, the game would be so much better than it is now.

tunabreath · Sep 26, 2007, 12:16 PM // 12:16

i'm not buying gw2 unless i can see that they fixed all the BS. probably not going to buy GW:EN either.

kvndoom · Sep 26, 2007, 12:25 PM // 12:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by glountz

I dunno.
You seem to imply Augury of Death would be still "imbalanced" after the changes I propose.
But explain me why, so, Phantom Pain isn't so much used? Phantom pain deals the deep wound wether it is removed or not, and that is quite terrific for me. Augury can be removed easily through prevailing or quick hex removal, so there is generic counters to use, and if removed it doesn't apply the deep wound.
Augury can actually be spammed a lot thanks to its low recharge, fast casting time, and low energy cost. Increasing energy cost would seriously hamper spikes based on augury.
BTW, the expose defense nerf should have been an energy cost increase to 15. Such an energy cost would have completely hampered the ability of the sin to unleash its combo (25 energy just to cast expose+SP). He would still have been able to do it but at the cost of energy equipment, and inability to reuse it after being DPed.
I don't think I'm the best balancer here, but I try to compare to other skills before thinking a balance.
For Augury I used Phantom pain as a reference.
I don't think there is so much inherent "broken skills". Generally, tweaking the recharge, energy cost, or effect they do would be sufficient to "balance" them.

Phantom Pain vs. Augury- the Illusion line doesn't have a non elite KD + poison spell, followed immediately buy a non-elite high damage armor-ignoring signet, all of which can be cast and reused in 1/2 time thanks to a non-elite stance (MoR lite?). Comaping Augury to Phantom Pain isn't much of a comparison really, until you factor in the supporting skills in the same attribute line. But that's really a discussion for a different topic.

rii · Sep 26, 2007, 12:37 PM // 12:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

I think you should probably wait for a bit more info before you start ruling out a game years away.

I think a more productive topic would be "what can ArenaNet improve for the PvP community to entice you to buy Guild Wars 2." It's a bit less doom and gloom, and could actually lead to positive changes.

Anet has to resolve quite a few issues before I'd think about buying GW2.

Firstly, the lack of balance on release. The first time I remember going into HA, I fought an 7 monk 1 warrior team who stacked balthazars aura and raped everyone. This bug was fixed pretty quickly, and at first I thought, 'great, rolling balance will mean the game never gets out of hand'. However, after a while, I got bored of the continuous cycle of 'someone finds something broken -> Anet nerf it' which continued well up to Factions, at which point it was realised nerfing things all the time would soon leave them with no interesting skills, and they started a better system of nerfing/buffing.

While that thing might be described as a 'teething' issue, it kept coming, and was ultimately way too common. The game should be approximately balanced when it's released, not sent out in whatever format and then have rolling balance applied.

The argument given on several occasions was that these overpowered things were hard to pick up in the small scale testing of alpha and devs, but I was stupefied when Factions was released and Air or Enchantment was let loose. Within about 3 hours of release smite teams were destroying everyone (again), and after it was nerfed we were told they didn't see it coming. That may well be true, but in all honesty it's just awful to not predict these things. As creators of the game, Anet must have some understanding about the volatility of skill interaction, which was broken several more times after that with new skill releases (recurring instability/soul barbs for e.g.)

All of it indicated that Anet were just not able to handle the sheer volume of skills and interacting game mechanics they designed and introduced. Further, I really don't think the volume was necessary anyway. Many of the skills never saw play for a very long time, and although I haven't played the game for a while, some of them never were in my time (lightning touch?). In GW2 I would want to see a much smaller skillset, that can be easily managed and controlled if any level of serious pvp is to be promoted, unless Anet can really resolve the obvious problems they had with GW1. A smaller skillset doesn't make the game any worse - you can skill have massive variety, but hopefully along with a reduction in the number of game mechanics overpowered rubbish hopefully won't slip under the radar into public play.

Likewise too many game mechanics became a problem. As new classes were introduced they just kept racking up.
Shadowstepping from the sin, weapon spells and mass spirits from the rit, mass shouts and anthems from the para and forms from the dervish made making a decent balanced build pretty dam hard, which from what I hear has ended in this mass defense-vodway crap played today.

The level of game mechanics was probably already questionable before all that. Shouts, stances, traps, preps, etc were simply too minority in the proph game to cause problems, but the problem was there nonetheless.

As for the game formats, there were also problems. VOD has ultimately been a massive thorn in the side for GVG, and HA's direct 8v8 didn't take long to turn that mode into a cauldron of iway and bloodspikes and whatever else. RA was always a mess, and TA never got the support it needed to do anything significant. I won't go into the fairly well-documented problems of HvH and AB.

There may have been other problems (new player integration to pvp, etc) but the main ones for me are, in a simplified format:

- lack of balance on release
- too many skills
- too many game mechanics
- badly implemented game formats
- degrading quality of support for the fixing of above problems over time

Sort those out and I'll take another look. It would also help if you fixed GW1 first, so that I know you can actually do it. Just telling me, really really hard, that you're *going* to do it isn't going to make me buy GW2.

IMO.

suiraCLAW · Sep 26, 2007, 12:37 PM // 12:37

Quote:

Stable gameplay is probably a good thing, really.

Stable gameplay is only a good thing if for every situation you encounter there are multiple viable solutions, each with the same high risk/reward ratio. Otherwise, you end up doing some things exactly the same thing every match, over and over again, simply because you're forced to use the easiest/only solution. In our current meta, there are tons of possible situations with 1 solution that is way more useful/easier than the other ones, all which are handled the same way, some examples: melandru derves (solution: blockway), pressure teams (lod, blockway), ganks (sor runner using the same skill combo over and over again), etc, etc.

revaer · Sep 26, 2007, 12:49 PM // 12:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ado

Anet is largely responsible for the current mess. But don't forget that the average age of pvp-players has dropped from about 20 years old to 15 years old.
With all respect to the younger audience, they have a totally different mentallity towards "how" to play pvp, than the more mature players. This had a huge impact on how pvp evolved over time.

I think there is only bad balance to blame and the drop in the average age of PvP players results from mature PvP players leaving the game and the younger players staying. Not to say that fixing balance would make all problems go away and bring all the good players back, though.