do you think balancing for the top 10% of players is a good idea?

[Gaming Digi.9741]

The problem with balancing around the majority is that most of the time they think something's broken, while actually, it's just a rather high skill ceiling that struggles to be effective in a truly competitive game like an automated match in the monthly tournament. This brings unnecessary nerfs to a lot of classes because the said majority (which are mainly casuals to the game overall) can't be bothered learning the counterplays (like learning to dodge key skills or combos). The patch coming out Tuesday, although I am happy of the overall changes, shows just that. Most of the upcoming balance simply buffs a lot of the skill floor of professions like Chronomancer and Holosmith ( Chronomancer's rework Imo was needed but not to that extent, while Holosmith still has that broken aspect of spewing Stability out of the windows and still having such high survivability but gets super hard punished for over-heating because they felt like that was the correct nerf... lol) while dumbing down the skill ceiling of classes like Berserker, Weaver and Tempest by straight up buffing numbers.

Ben once said in the Welcome to PvP Discord that their "statistics" come from Gold 2 and higher. Whilst people constantly in G3 are usually at least somewhat decent players, G2 players have 0 awareness overall of fights or engagements or objectives. Having an account in P1 and an account in G2 (hey, can't win all the placements when bots appear aye, and ranking on two accounts... oh hell nah I don't have that time), even though the population in G2 is HUGE, like I rarely face or am teamed with the same people at all (no one I recognize from account names and all), they have nearly 0 knowledge of their class. Let's not mention knowledge of other classes. I came to the conclusion that G2 players, which represent the majority of the game mode's population, really know barely enough to press 1 through 0 and an occasional random dodge. A streamer in that bracket demonstrates it rather well, playing a Condi trap ranger and not knowing his matchups or when to leave fights. G2 players and below, yeah they represent the majority of the population but lack the general knowledge necessary for good balance. That's why they shouldn't be just as sought-after for their input in balance patch notes, especially in PvP.

Balancing around "fun" is the reason why this game isn't as competitive as it could potentially be. Balancing around "competitiveness" would lower the population, yes, but would, in the long run, be better for the game mode's health. In fact, that could bring GW2's competitive game mode known as sPvP to a larger public that could potentially even increase the overall population while keeping it fun in Unranked and competitive anywhere else.

[Exedore.6320]

The true answer is "both".

At lower levels balance matters, but it doesn't need to be extremely precise. It mostly needs to ensure that the effort required to execute something should be close to the effort needed to defend against it. Turret engineer is the prime example of this problem where it was very simple to execute, but hard to defeat.

High level is where you need to be more precise in balance.

In neither case should the focus be on the "meta". Many builds and strategies should be viable for all levels of play.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@ZhouX.8742 said:in an attempt to allow newcomers to come in.

I looked away for a sec and in my periphery I swear I thought newcomers said necromancers for a sec lol. was about to get mad haha.

[MrAmputatoes.6031]

Definitely yes to the 10% cause otherwise balance will be hell. Look at revs, pretty useless at lower tiers, but good revs can dominate teamfights.

[Kattenpootjes.4291]

Absolutely not, the gw2 community should never EVER! Have a say in anything related to balance or pretty much anything really.

[MithranArkanere.8957]

It is the worst possible idea.

The one characteristic of deserving top tier players is that they can adapt to anything.If any player can't stay top tier after a Balance Update, they do NOT belong on the top tier. Nobody in their right mind would argue that.

But when newbies come into the mode, if they find a hostile entry level with things like builds that can take them down in less than 1s from stealth and from out of combat without building up a single stack of vulnerability while they have a tanky build, they will just go "NOPE!", turn around, and never come back.
GW2 doesn't have training tutorials or training challenges to learn the basics, there's no vsAI matches, there's no replays, death cams or spectator mode while defeated, the combat logs are kind of lacking.
It's already hard enough to learn PvP. If they go and repeatedly die in 1s, they won't have any time to learn anything at all.

All games bleed players over time, so entry level is crucial to keep new players coming in. So catering only to the feedback of the top tier will only get you an empty game mode.

Of course, that doesn't mean top tier should be ignored. Flagrant balance issues need to be addressed asap, it doesn't matter what tier.

[Euthymias.7984]

It cant be worse than using a dartboard to determine who/what gets nerfed.I also cant agree with the idea of balancing around "fun" because that's entirely subjective between players. Something can be balanced in the grand scheme of the meta but not fun to play against. Do such things deserve to be made irrelevant because they're not "fun" to deal with for some?

Furthermore, I think that its more important to address the heart of actual complaints instead of just messing with things around an entire spec while leaving the problem untouched. Here's an example: People bitched about Druid resetting forever on side-nodes because of -Celestial Shadow- but it was never touched....instead, its healing and Avatar's Cooldown got hit repeatedly...glyphs got gutted (before a very questionable rework that hasnt really helped anything), and now even staff got a nerf. Basically they took a long way around "addressing" the problem Druid posed instead of just hitting the actual problem. The same could be said for Mirage and the Elusive Mind debacle, and many others.