Balance: What is your TOP priority?

Which of the following, if you could choose ONLY ONE to ‘perfectly’ balance, what would it be?

I really don't see much issues, if classes are not equal in zergs or roaming. You can make one class to take part to zergs, and another class to go roaming. It does not hurt if you have few choices, thought. It would also not hurt that those classes are different, and that no class can dominate entirely: for example, you would have necro-only WvW (roamers would all be necros, zergs would be full-necro-zergballs etc), or that you would have one class that dominates roaming and the same class is needed in larger amounts in zergs, too. It's in the end a thin line here, of course, but anyways.

If the battle zone could be balanced so that there is enough action at all scales (solo roaming, small groups, zergs) at majority of hours, that would be pretty good. Expecting of course that there is some class diversity in compositions.

I think population alone is the wrong way to think about balancing coverage. Balanced coverage is not just about having exactly the same number of people on each side in every timezone, it's about having the same number of competent players on each side in every timezone. The problem is that there are very very few competent players left playing the game in any timezone anywhere. They tend to want to play with other competent players and not have to carry and who can blame them?

The first option is an impossibility - you cannot force players to play at certain times.The second option is an inconvenience that will feed toxicity to insane levels - equal representation would mean class limitations and restrictions.The third option is a complete fantasy - skill alone can never decide anything in an RPG with classes and dozens of skills because that goes against the principle of an RPG with classes and having dozens of skills.

So... other? :/

Necro can roam and does not have kill me first invisible tag on his head.

@Israel.7056 said:The problem is that there are very very few competent players left playing the game in any timezone anywhere. They tend to want to play with other competent players and not have to carry and who can blame them?I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

@Israel.7056 said:The problem is that there are very very few competent players left playing the game in any timezone anywhere. They tend to want to play with other competent players and not have to carry and who can blame them?

This is the problem. The average WvW player is about bronze PvP skill level, and outside of maguuma (and even on that server to some extent) WvW has become a game of “follow the clueless leader”.

WvW is unplayable for me currently. Lots of people trying to role play and have social hour on a near 7 year old game.

EDIT; people playing WvW still argue soulbeast is weak over a year after POF release lmfao. That’s the level of cluelessness in WvW right now.

@Shining One.1635 said:I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

I can't speak for everyone who's been playing this game as long as I have.

My personal explanation is that I just don't have the time or patience to try to teach someone relatively new or inexperienced or just badly taught by someone else everything I know about the game after years of experience and thousands upon thousands of fights.

I also happen to think that there are some things about this game that simply cannot be taught, they can only be learned through thousands of hours of trial and error and dedicated reflection and examination outside of the game.

I'm not personally willing to sacrifice my satisfaction of the game on a daily basis for the possibility that it might make a matchup more balanced. In my view, the cost of trying to fix the competence gap is simply too high and too time consuming at this point to be realistically possible.

If you're asking why the experienced guilds don't transfer all over the place the answer is simple: no one wants to have to try to carry an entire server by themselves. We recently tried it and it sucks let me tell you.

@Israel.7056 said:

@"Shining One.1635" said:I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

And this is why WvW has suffered to what it is now from the beginning. Players who learned fast and "got good" gravitated to each other and developed this very mindset that their time is too precious to spend teaching recruits. Once you recruit and absorb all of the talent you become the dominant force. Its only a matter of time after that point that you conquer everything. What you have won by conquering over 6 years is a stale game mode. And you have only yourselves to blame for it. Enjoy siege-ing down your walls and gates and dpsing down your npcs.

@TokenG.7863 said:

@Israel.7056 said:

@"Shining One.1635" said:I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

I don't think he likes to siege, and kills npcs.

D:

@TokenG.7863 said:

@Israel.7056 said:

@"Shining One.1635" said:I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

Well first of all my time is too precious to spend teaching recruits but that doesn't mean everyone at my level of experience or greater feels that way. Some people really enjoy teaching novices.

Secondly I got to where I am by showing up and playing for years and I made friends along the way. It wasn't some concerted 6 year effort to consolidate talent it has been me showing up consistently to play with my friends. I could not know along the way who was going to be around at the six year mark and who wouldn't be. I just played with people I liked just like everyone else.

Thirdly I do not find gw2 to be stale. If I did I wouldn't be playing the game anymore. As long as there are people to fight and I'm still having fun playing I'll keep showing up to play.

@"Israel.7056" said:I think population alone is the wrong way to think about balancing coverage. Balanced coverage is not just about having exactly the same number of people on each side in every timezone, it's about having the same number of competent players on each side in every timezone. The problem is that there are very very few competent players left playing the game in any timezone anywhere. They tend to want to play with other competent players and not have to carry and who can blame them?

Do you think the incompetent players enjoy being steamrolled? Do you think they will keep returning to WvW to let you steamroll over them? Surely you can see where this has and continues to head towards. You say "They want to play with other competent players and not have to carry" which means to me that they share your feeling that they don't want to use their precious time to help them. Granted, there's not too terribly much to learn in WvW. Dodge, bomb, use survival skills to stay up. Stay on tag. Class meta changes every 6 months or so, so everyone changes the way they play according to that. Kinda sad.

@TokenG.7863 said:

@Israel.7056 said:

@"Shining One.1635" said:I'll never understand this mindset. What's the fun in running over 50 unskilled players with your 50 skilled players? When I played games (admittedly a different genre) competitively at a higher level, we'd spread the talent around so the matchups were more balanced and fun.

Just that most people don't want to learn, as you know it's kinda hard and it takes 3+ months to be palatable for non-casual guilds and 6+ months for top ones. I've only had a few people actually go though whole process and therefor succeed. That goes for 1 year casuals of WvWers and totally new WvWers, as for the ones familiar with usual pug WvW need some brain reprogramming to remove bad habits.

As for top priority. Even if only 1 class is played, but the gameplay is fun than i'll take it. Now it simply isn't. Since PoF release, we've been playing oneshot meta and bad pugs were playing pirateship as always.

My main priority is to create engaging gameplay. Not just "hammer up" or "hammer down" a skill. Regardless of nerfs or buffs, the tendency is to make all skills much more dull. The worst part is people don't actually change their gameplay.

Create a game that people want to actually play. All else is meaningless without that.

@TokenG.7863 said:Do you think the incompetent players enjoy being steamrolled?

Do you think I enjoy trying to carry incompetent players? Why does their enjoyment of the game matter more than mine?

Do you think they will keep returning to WvW to let you steamroll over them?

I mean...yeah because they can blob up and steamroll they can play defensive and build siege. They have options.

Surely you can see where this has and continues to head towards.

Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo.

Granted, there's not too terribly much to learn in WvW. Dodge, bomb, use survival skills to stay up. Stay on tag. Class meta changes every 6 months or so, so everyone changes the way they play according to that. Kinda sad.

Sad that it's so simple and yet so many people are still so bad at it somehow?

@"Israel.7056" said:

Sad that it's so simple and yet so many people are still so bad at it somehow?

Extremely. But expected. The game doesn't really force people to get better especially in wvw since one can get carried. What's worse is the high variance in WvW which really doesn't give people proper feedback. Like people will win 30 vs 15 and think whatever they're running is awesome.

It only gets worse when the game changes. People will refuse to change their ways, and just chalk it up to something. This is a game where if someone wants to learn, they can easily reach a level of competency that is higher than that of "veterans" that may have played for years but still manage to 0-push (die before the fight even starts) every single time due to this complacency.

I mean, it's not specific to Gw2, but I've just noticed it more here. Even with myself; I'm just so insanely horrible outside of WvW (not that I'm good in it either) that I'm just wondering "wow, even noobs have an excuse; how does this guy fail jumps when it's not even a jumping puzzle!?"

WvW just fits really oddly into the game gw2 has become, by that I mean it's pve.You can play the majority of this game by spamming 1, not knowing a thing about build synergy (or selecting traits) or even being aware of your hero panel. They try pvp, they're automatically matched with others of similar competence, in general the game doesn't even let on that there's things they've missed.. Until they come to WvW where they're hit with every inadequacy like a blast from a fire hose.

@TokenG.7863 said:Granted, there's not too terribly much to learn in WvW. Dodge, bomb, use survival skills to stay up. Stay on tag. Class meta changes every 6 months or so, so everyone changes the way they play according to that. Kinda sad.

If WvW is so simple as you put, why these players continue to be incompetent when there is so little to learn?

@Jeknar.6184 said:

@TokenG.7863 said:Granted, there's not too terribly much to learn in WvW. Dodge, bomb, use survival skills to stay up. Stay on tag. Class meta changes every 6 months or so, so everyone changes the way they play according to that. Kinda sad.

Because so many don't want to teach. They would rather berate and troll new players about how bad they suck when they start out. Everybody sucked on their first week playing. Players come in to wvw usually not ready for what they meet, especially this late in the game. They don't know to look for stab or invulns on targets before they mash a button. Or what traits or gear to take to survive. Most of that takes some guidance to figure out. Some people are just too lazy and don't have any inclination to learn.

@TokenG.7863 said:

Because so many don't want to teach. They would rather berate and troll new players about how bad they suck when they start out. Everybody sucked on their first week playing.

...And somebody told us we sucked too.Welcome to the internet!

Players come in to wvw usually not ready for what they meet, especially this late in the game. They don't know to look for stab or invulns on targets before they mash a button. Or what traits or gear to take to survive. Most of that takes some guidance to figure out. Some people are just too lazy and don't have any inclination to learn.

A LOT of people are too lazy to learn. Sometimes they even have the gall to complain to other customers, like they were NPC's here for their convenience, without doing so much as a Google search. As you say the games' indeed long in the tooth, the media is there free for perusal.

@TokenG.7863 said:

@Jeknar.6184 said:

@TokenG.7863 said:Granted, there's not too terribly much to learn in WvW. Dodge, bomb, use survival skills to stay up. Stay on tag. Class meta changes every 6 months or so, so everyone changes the way they play according to that. Kinda sad.

I spent a lot of time teaching in EOTM back in the day because I found it a good way to get people interested in real WvW. I enjoyed answering questions, trying to figure out how to deal with guilds like [HK], [sF], [ND], etc. and fighting against the odds when we were outnumbered with 10 people against 100. What was most rewarding though was when players I recognized as previously being pugs started to try commanding themselves, I started seeing them in real WvW or when it was visibly noticable that my squad was starting to fall in line with my teachings. I'm not saying I was the sole reason some of these people improved, but I am saying it felt good when I had an impact, especially all the times I got whispers after a match from people thanking me for the excitement.

That's just the positive side of it though. I was driven away from doing this because far more often the pugs were too lazy to try or listen and I was starting to lose my patients more often. No matter how many times or ways I might explain something to some people, they would continue to ignore it. And then you have the kinds of players that are clearly still learning yet think they're better than everyone else and constantly bringing down group morale by harassing commanders. Or best of all, the amount of players I might lose if there was any sign of a challenge. Sure you could argue, "well it's EOTM, they're PvE'ers" but it really isn't much different than real WvW. You get maybe 2 or 3 more tries in real WvW but if you lose or have to play defensive there's a good chance a lot of players are going to bugger off to do their own thing.

I would love to continue commanding and teaching but because of the overwhelming amount of players that have the learning capacity of a toaster oven, it just doesn't feel worth it. And honestly, people berate commanders a whole lot more than commanders berate pugs in my experience. There are always a handful of commanders on every server that like to blame their pugs for everything but the pugs are the same every where. If you're not a superstar or being supported by your guild, prepare to be screamed at for every mistake.

@LetoII.3782 said:

@TokenG.7863 said:

Because so many don't want to teach. They would rather berate and troll new players about how bad they suck when they start out. Everybody sucked on their first week playing.

Players come in to wvw usually not ready for what they meet, especially this late in the game. They don't know to look for stab or invulns on targets before they mash a button. Or what traits or gear to take to survive. Most of that takes some guidance to figure out. Some people are just too lazy and don't have any inclination to learn.

So what's the solution? Is there one at this point. Just let it die ? How does someone balance a game around a players's skill level if there isn't even a metric there for that. Or just ball as many veterans as you can into an alliance and just go out and kick the teeth out of everything that isn't even a challenge. I'm genuinely interested in how thats going to turn out. Maybe they could put wvw on a queue system like pvp and eotm is and build teams on the fly for several hour time periods. Perhaps when alliances come out, they can claim time slots/days to queue their guilds for rally times.

@TokenG.7863 said:

@LetoII.3782 said:

@TokenG.7863 said:

Because so many don't want to teach. They would rather berate and troll new players about how bad they suck when they start out. Everybody sucked on their first week playing.

Players come in to wvw usually not ready for what they meet, especially this late in the game. They don't know to look for stab or invulns on targets before they mash a button. Or what traits or gear to take to survive. Most of that takes some guidance to figure out. Some people are just too lazy and don't have any inclination to learn.

I don't ball as many veterans as possible into one group as I can <,< Most of us don't, there's only 2 +30 veteran guilds left on NA. In fact, just last week we adopted a new player who'd watched a few minutes of youtube.. That's how low standards are.. Just being self reliant enough to ask his computer a question that's been answered a million times by people, already, was enough to stand out. And dominating in WvW Zerg fights is about a very small number of people in that Zerg actually doing what they're supposed to

Realized I should vote.Most of the game is invested in minimal effort. As the least effort team-wise is a team of one, most of WvW is played as duel-within-a-group. Yes, zergs are dominant but they're also becoming rare as popular commanders fade out and aren't replaced. So as far as I see it, the future of WvW is going to be large masses of pugs aimlessly wandering around.. And with that will come a strong presence of whatever the best 1v1 spec is.

People that know me like the op might think I'd prioritize time zones, but I don't feel this is a balance issue so much as a design flaw... There's 20 million Australians, there's 500 million people in the western hemisphere. Of course the Aussies can't fill a system designed for the population of the US and Brazil, and they were given no incentive to try. Such being the case, there was no time zone balance to begin with, and any attempt by Anet to offer such feature will be new ground.

The basis of skilled PvP (and indeed good PvP) is competition, WvW fails miserably at that, which is why most of what few actual competent players there were left long ago when it became abundantly clear that WvW was not meaningfully supported, let alone things like GvG.

Only PvE bads pat themselves on the back for beating players who have way less experience or have different priorities like playing what they find fun (especially in a game where playing whatever is the current cheese makes up such a large proportion of "skill") or even more tragic getting excited about beating some guy who it turns out is 70.

There is nothing more amusing in GW2 than the irony of being on TS/Discord (or watching a stream) where some guy is calling the group or individual they just beat terrible, oblivious to the reality that in 2018 more than ever WvW is trash tier PvP and if they were even vaguely decent they would be off playing a skilled, competitive PvP game, not pseudo PvP for PvE players.

As for the OP and balance, that is simply more delusion, WvW has never been remotely balanced for the simple reason it is not a priority for Anet, nor considered a serious game mode.