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ArenaLabs PvP Podcast - Community Questions with CMC!


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HUGE ANNOUCEMENT!!!!

The ArenaLabs PvP Podcast is happy to announce that the Guild Wars 2 Developer CMC will be coming on the show to talk about everything and anything PvP related!This is where you all come in. We want to give you, the community an opportunity to ask questions about hot topics within our PvP scene!

There are certain topics, CMC can and cannot talk about and there is only so much we can ask him at once so please bare this in mind. Our aim is to have a healthy discussion about the game and learn some of the cool behind the scenes things only a games developer can answer.

Feel free to drop questions below and we will do our best to ask as many as possible during the show.

If you want to check out our content you can find us on:YouTubeSpotifyPodbean

Stay competitive and see you all in the arena!

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@"Broady.2358" said:HUGE ANNOUCEMENT!!!!

The ArenaLabs PvP Podcast is happy to announce that the Guild Wars 2 Developer CMC will be coming on the show to talk about everything and anything PvP related!This is where you all come in. We want to give you, the community an opportunity to ask questions about hot topics within our PvP scene!

There are certain topics, CMC can and cannot talk about and there is only so much we can ask him at once so please bare this in mind. Our aim is to have a healthy discussion about the game and learn some of the cool behind the scenes things only a games developer can answer.

Feel free to drop questions below and we will do our best to ask as many as possible during the show.

If you want to check out our content you can find us on:YouTubeSpotifyPodbean

Stay competitive and see you all in the arena!

I have one question.....

Can you (dev) give us a clear and open interpretation about the design philosophy for each class?-What each class supposed to be in their eyes, I am really curious to know

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Will we ever see changes to animations of skills or the order of a skills function (Rifle Brutal shot (warrior)) to keep up with the ever changing gameplay.

Will we ever see a total rework of a weapon set and not just a change of numbers/conditions, like we got with the 'rifle rework' (warrior)

Will we see changes to Warhorn (warrior) that really give it impact so it would be used in power builds and not just Support builds (e.g. skill 4 Charge providing Swiftness, Superspeed and 5s of 10% (pvp) 25% (pve) damage increase to allies). The current warhorn sees almost all its use on support specs as the 2 attack bonus of 10% is heavily underwelming.

There are hundreds of questions I'd like to ask, but I'll leave it as just those for now.

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What are the baselines for appropriate power level per class - is balancing done in relation to specific build's effectiveness, or in relation to it's competition in meta/with other classes in the particular niche? In other words, when changes are made - is bigger picture a consideration? Does influence of nerfs to one build within a class inform what needs to be compensated in order for the entirety of the class to not fall out of playability?

Can we expect to see certain underused utilities, traits and skills getting a touch-up/upgrade, especially those that severely show their age functionally? Are there plans to rework placeholder traits with 5 minutes CDs into anything else?

The burning question of tradeoffs - are they really necessary, and how exactly are they determined? Should we expect more of those? Should we keep an eye out for reverts instead?

And last one I am really curious about, are we going to see functional reductions rather than number cuts - the way I see it, if all of our skills apply 1 second of a bunch of boons, all it does is merely making us use more skills to compensate. For instance, I would live with Jaunt not dealing damage at all if it meant that we get 3 charges back, or Firebrand skills generally doing less different things but without nick-and-dime boons/tiny condition durations that are often end up being so short they lead to very lacking impact, which is why FB at the moment is underwhelming?

Also, the very first question of design philosophy is something I second very hard. I would love to hear this too.

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okay then, my question would regard the game design/ MAP design. I wondered how our PvP Conquest maps are created, what kind of developement process lies behind it. So having some insight on that topic, especially the thoughts behind designing them, what separates a good from a great pvp map and such things ^^ obviously you know ive been thinking about that for a while, as podcast topic hehe :P you already know it!

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Anything PvP related, or are we only allowed to ask about balance there?

Ranked DuoQ removed, adjusted, or given its own queue when?Freebie pips removed from Ranked when? (As in no more pips awarded just for being there)How rating is awarded/deducted in Ranked rework when? (As in changing how rating is given or taken away at the end of a ranked match. It is completely RNG with how many people are playing right now.)

And will there ever be like, a UI menu/feature for class swapping? Instead of playing scuffed rock, paper, scissors and having the person with the game loaded to an SSD or a Cloud Gaming service getting the counterpick before the match starts.Also a symbol to distinguish when your teammate is swapping and playing that boring metagame and not actually disconnecting from your match?

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can you clarify this podcast to the community 'Hot take, Thief is good for the game with Impact'? because all i am hearing are reasons to keep Thief Stealth in their Toxic state?

Thief Profession being a 'Pressure class', can you elaborate on this? Are there any planes of redesigning Thief/Mesmer Profession once after all? Are there plans of redefining Profession roles because at the moment, every Professions are playing each other roles, in fact even performing and outperforming each other roles extendedly?

Lastly, Profession Identity-

Mesmer, Elementalist Professions have no identity whatsoever, are there any plans to give them identities with having a complete redesign?

Thank You in advanced

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any chances of expanding on the game modes? you're kinda limiting pvp to people who like playing conquest over and over.

possible to expand core classes weapon sets?

you guys gonna continue with the traitline/ utility skill reworks? some weapons really need some help too, such as ele scepter and most classes offhands.

there are some unfilled utility/ heal/ elite slots (such as necro elite well, guardian consecration heal), any interest in completing these?

are you guys open to changing/ tweaking classes tradeoffs?

what we all wanna know... what the hell happened to the 4-6 week cadence of balance tweaks?

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Dear CMC,

If the common suggestions of:1). Removing duoqueue in ranked to prevent high tier duo balance swings2). Removing ability to switch classes pre match

  • were implemented to improve balance, how do you plan to improve both balance and build diversity in Pvp, given that most classes (seem) to have niches only in specific roles? How could this be addressed?
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Prior to- and during the February 25th balance patch, we were promised more frequent balance patches, and faster hotfixes. Currently we're seeing overtuned classes and traits, such as engineer (do I need to mention grenades and explosive entrance?), lich on necromancer, sevenshots on renegade might even be a wee bit overtuned, and then we have a few classes that are able to do "something" while being in an invulnerable state. Doing damage or granting others protection (healing, boons, etc) while being invulnerable has no counter play, which is the epitome of imbalance. If a class can have perma-stability (flamethrower engineer), there's no way I can interrupt this using skills.

So my first question is:

  • What is keeping CMC from implementing balance changes faster?

I also have an issue about how the community is kept in the dark with basically all changes, and you have to be high up in the system, as a player, to even get some information about what is maybe planned. The vague, quarterly general updates are simply not enough.

So, second question:

  • How about a monthly update? Simple "this month we've worked on X, and we plan to work on Y" would suffice.

Thirdly:

  • Will we see a deduction in rank requirements for the highest tier ascended PvP armor? Like we saw for WvW where the rank 2000 armor requirements were reduced to rank 500.

And last:

  • Will there ever be something done to the level of toxicity within the game mode? This is probably number one reason why the player base is not increasing. Faster reaction to verbal abuse would be a solution.

I wanted to ask CMC to address the increase in players reported for cheating (with evidence being quite compelling) , but I guess the questions above might be a whole podcast in itself.

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@"Dadnir.5038" said:Let's drop a bomb: "Will there be sPvP masteries?"There are PvE masteries and WvW masteries, so will masteries also come to sPvP? What kind of effects do you think masteries could have on the gamemode without breaking balance?

Game needs mario kart like beetle race tracks where you have attack skills to hit each other.

New pvp mode.

Bam, game fixed.

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Please ask kindly:

  • Are they planning on more events like we had the past week. like it. Can they make more? New things?
  • Any new Plan how to manage the "report" system to better handle afk'ers/wintraders/trashtalkers/hakers and bots? -> report option "bot"/"haking" ?
  • Are "Big" changes are planned for cantha?
  • Balance updates soon?? you are about 4 years behind a reasonable schedule...
  • Anytime soon someone offical from arenanet talks regular with the community about the state of the balance to help the balance team.
  • Can we in any timeframe expect better communication about everything?
  • Bugfixes? some **** exists since forever.? From map to skills etc.
  • Will you finish the AT panel UI? or is this the finished state?
  • Does arenanet care about PvP?
  • Can we have more information regarding PvP statistics freely available? (How many players are playing per day, How many players are at what ratings, etc. just fun statistics you have and could share. )
  • Can we expect anywhere in the future fast hotfixes for broken balance?
  • Does core ele gets the core rev treatment? or will tempest and weaver get another tradeoff? (core rev got an personal F2)
  • When you make balance changes to you look at real discussion from the community?
  • Are you testing your changes you publish? Could community testing with reward be a thing?
  • Can a team surrender if they want to? like 3/5 yes or 4/5.? -> for example 4v5 because someone has dc'd etc.
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@HeadCrowned.6834 said:I would ask people to just ask 1 or 2 questions since otherwise it might become a messy maze in here.

My question is what Anets vision is on the current status of the tradeoffs that elite specs are supposed to have and whether they think that the impact of these tradeoffs are balanced between all professions.

Just want to point out: tradeoffs don't necessarily need to be balanced when it comes to impact between classes.Elite specs in general have different impacts on the class, some are changing the class majorly and add alot of power and others don't so much.

If you don't gain so much from an elite spec, you also shouldn't have to give up much, don't you agree?

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@Kodama.6453 said:Just want to point out: tradeoffs don't necessarily need to be balanced when it comes to impact between classes.Elite specs in general have different impacts on the class, some are changing the class majorly and add alot of power and others don't so much.

If you don't gain so much from an elite spec, you also shouldn't have to give up much, don't you agree?

So in short: are they balanced.

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Let's say hypothetically the game were perfectly balanced profession-wise (unlikely).What's stopping casual people that just started playing PvP from matching with P+ players? It's happening now already and the blatant match manipulation in the form of alts (just look at the leaderboard) is killing the game mode.

FYI: I didn't play PVP for months and this season I remember I was matched up against a duo-Q with top 20 players that had another duo-Q on their team (so not one but two duo-Qs) when everyone on my team was not duo-Qing and highly unlikely to be top 20.

It's probably a similar scenario at the low end as well, where you get either bots , afkers (pip farmers/ wintraders), or people that can't even be carried. Unranked and ATs are more acceptable in the sense that if you have bad players you aren't forced to play with them again (and in the case of unranked it doesn't hurt you as much). This is one of the major reasons people prefer WvW to PvP (besides sitting on capture points and having to fight in a confined space) despite rewards being far worse in WvW.

As JorKadeen.3846 wrote: are there plans to manage the "report" system to better handle all the issues that aren't stemming from (supposed) profession balance issues? Even if not using the report system, there should be analytics to easily determine that if someone is playing more than 8 hours a day non-stop PVP they should be auto-flagged for more monitoring. A few seasons ago I noticed that some players had multiple times more matches than people that play this game "as a job" (streaming).

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