GW to GW2 brief interview from back in the day

[Allarius.5670]

Interesting read regarding profession niche and balance approach going from GW to GW2. What do you think? Regarding its impact to PvP, are we still seeing this approach or have things taken a detour (for better or worse)?

https://www.killtenrats.com/2009/09/17/guild-wars-interview/

[Mikkel.8427]

This interview was illuminating. Thank you for posting.

[Aeolus.3615]

That’s gw1 balance.... when e readed lots of skills and balance, this is a gw1 talk...

Gw2 ideals have nothing to do with that interview.....

[Allarius.5670]

@Aeolus.3615 said:That’s gw1 balance.... when e readed lots of skills and balance, this is a gw1 talk...

Gw2 ideals have nothing to do with that interview.....

They discuss specific lessons they learned from GW1 and at at the end how they expect that to carry over to GW2.

[Eddbopkins.2630]

I don't think the current gw2 is anything what she talks about and explains. After 7 years, shouldn't it have evolved and grown? However i see it as the opposite. Gw2 has shrucken and diminished from its glory days of pvp in gw1 and has never even come close it. In terms of popularity, and diversity. Diversitiy in game modes, maps, and builds. Gw2 pvp has fallen so short of it predecessor that i find it embarrassing it shares the same name.....im sorry to say this but this is my honest opinion.

Edit: yet i play this one single pvp game mode almost everynight. I really hope for more game modes and viable build diversity so badly.

[Exedore.6320]

We've gone off a cliff. Like GW1, GW2 originally had professions with strengths and weaknesses and a broad playstyle. Elite specs removes the weaknesses and added strength. The power creep is crazy and professions/builds don't feel that different anymore.

[Aeolus.3615]

@Allarius.5670 said:

@Aeolus.3615 said:That’s gw1 balance.... when e readed lots of skills and balance, this is a gw1 talk...

Gw2 ideals have nothing to do with that interview.....

They discuss specific lessons they learned from GW1 and at at the end how they expect that to carry over to GW2.

THEY were creating hype nothing more.. gw2 was never that.

The only lesson they learned from gw1 is that it was hard to balance all those skill, so they wanted to create a game where they should not care about it.

[Swagg.9236]

@"Exedore.6320" said:We've gone off a cliff. Like GW1, GW2 originally had professions with strengths and weaknesses and a broad playstyle. Elite specs removes the weaknesses and added strength. The power creep is crazy and professions/builds don't feel that different anymore.

GW2 lacked profession roles and drawbacks long before elite specs existed. Right after launch, GW2's main PvE meta was comprised entirely of 3 classes (which didn't really change, by the way, until HoT). The only reason anyone brought Thieves along was for stealth spam, and even that class was utterly unnecessary until anet nerfed consumable items. PvP found itself in the same situation: ruled by a small oligarchy of classes which just did better damage and had better passive/instant defenses than the others. Classes such as Warrior, Mesmer, Ranger, Engineer and Necromancer ran the gambit from sub-optimal to worthless in nearly every PvP encounter; matches were ruled by Thieves and Elementalists. Whatever they were saying about Magic's color wheel and its relation to GW1 might have been somewhat true, but whenever they stepped toward relating that to GW2's development, everything just became outright lies. GW2 is just generic damage and generic, mostly passive, defenses.

And I'm pretty sure that the terms "duelist" and "roamer" respectively were invented out of thin air by the GW2 PvP playerbase just to prevent their fragile minds from shattering due to cognitive dissonance.

[Widmo.3186]

Izzy: Our goal is game balance, first and foremost. There are different ways to achieve game balance other than dropping a skill entirely. From a player’s perspective, it’s easier to understand that a skill has been changed than dropped altogether – particularly for more casual players. When we balanced Smiter’s Boon, for example, that was about as close to getting rid of a skill as we could go.

Then: <3Now: xD

Linsey: Honestly, pulling stats on skills doesn’t give us a lot of useful information re: skill usage. The community does a great job of telling us what their problems are. Often player input can be more useful than pulling stats or looking at metrics. In terms of lessons learned, we’ve found that the solution for balance issues is to look for the root problem. The answer to a problem with Skill A may not be to nerf that skill, but to nerf Skill B or adjust a game mechanic like Soul Reaping or buff stacking. So the real key is washing away the symptoms to find what the real illness is. We want to treat the core disease, not just the symptoms.

Then: <3Now: xD

Izzy: For Guild Wars, we had two big demographics of players — PvP and PvE — and we tried to make all of our skills work for both player sets. There are some skills that work well in both PvE and PvP, but not all of them. Going into Guild Wars 2, we now recognize that we have two different game types. We need to address the different needs of each game type without negatively affecting either one. If we don’t properly handle skills in both formats, we end up hurting both games.

Then: <3Now: xD

Thank you for posting this interview, big nostalgia hit.

[MyPuppy.8970]

When and how did it go wrong?

[witcher.3197]

Too bad neither of these devs have worked on the GW2 balance team since release (which I find weird since both are still at Anet).

[Swagg.9236]

@"MyPuppy.8970" said:When and how did it go wrong?

The fact that a good portion of Anet leadership got busted, wiped and restructured by NCSoft for trying to work on a secret project while still benefiting off of GW2 revenue speaks to probably how deep the fundamental design issues of GW2 truly run. Also take note of how so many core developers from GW1 ended up leaving Anet either prior to GW2's launch or early on during its lifetime. With this in mind, it's not difficult to assume that those of Anet responsible for the secret project's creation were probably already meddling with GW1 and GW2's respective developments long, long before the game even released. I've always said that GW2 was doomed in 2010, mostly because we saw bloat classes like Thief, Guardian and Engineer receiving spoilers around then and leading into 2011; point is that it takes time to compromise a game's core so greatly. It's important to note how many classes, skills and features made it into the launch-state game despite how the playerbase progressed to utilizing only a very small handful of those options in order to completely smash apart the entirety of GW2's respective PvE and PvP scenes. This points to a distinct lack of defined leadership and priority during development.

Clearly, GW2's developmental direction was never properly focused, its staff pools were never adequately communicative due to their structure, and the game was probably in full "FFXIV Stormblood mode" during its entire life span: meaning that it was being developed by a company who was simultaneously siphoning (secretly in this case) a huge pool of its resources into a different project (FFXIV's Stormblood expansion, which was described as mediocre to sub-par within the franchise, was developed while SquareEnix was putting most of its efforts into Final Fantasy XV). After launch, the game received very little when it came to renewable content (particularly during the initial "Living World" phase which took months to add tiny shreds of content only to remove them after two-week periods). There was definitely no real, long-term plan for the game, which is why we saw so much content drought and developmental flailing from Q2 of 2013 onward. What little crew was left for GW2 ended up desperately padding the void with terrible story-writing, transient content and PvP powercreep.'

Basically, GW2 was most likely critically compromised even during the early alpha stages. The franchise's core group of developers had mostly jumped ship by launch, with many others following suit just a year or so afterward. This, combined with the reality of how NCSoft had to step in and stop development of a secret project which was funded via GW2's revenue points to a deep vein of conflict within Anet's leadership and staff that probably stemmed far back before GW2 as an IP was even ready for public reveal (maybe as far back as GW1 Utopia, but ultimately, we just don't have the details to assume too much).

[Lincolnbeard.1735]

@witcher.3197 said:Too bad neither of these devs have worked on the GW2 balance team since release (which I find weird since both are still at Anet).

The only explanation I have is that balance team is a bad spot or where you begin and than you go up in ranks. It even explains why the balance is utter kitten.The only thing that doesn't fit is that Robert is part of ANet since gw1, perhaps he behave bad and was downgraded into balance team?!

[witcher.3197]

@Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

@witcher.3197 said:Too bad neither of these devs have worked on the GW2 balance team since release (which I find weird since both are still at Anet).

The only explanation I have is that balance team is a bad spot or where you begin and than you go up in ranks. It even explains why the balance is utter kitten.The only thing that doesn't fit is that Robert is part of ANet since gw1, perhaps he behave bad and was downgraded into balance team?!

Robert was the main balance guy in the late years of GW1, so maybe that's just his preferred area.

Now that I think about it.. Robert also powercreeped GW1 PvP quite a lot but at least designed a lot of cool things that were good for build diversity. GW2 balance team is exactly like that: good at designing fun stuff, utter shit at balancing it.