shrew.3059

I've struggled with this question as the high level player, but it's so hard to pull your punches that you end up just being a nuisance longer. The best solution I've found is to try to get in and out fast enough that you don't ruin someone's entire play session, which paradoxically means you need to kill things faster. Also consider that once you get to higher levels, these "arrogant" and "selfish" players may just be the ones you want around to help you complete events or hero points.

Guess what I did when A&E made that move? I stopped watching. I didn't shout at a cloud, I just stopped. Luckily there were plenty of channels and shows that catered to my interests. I hope you'll find a video game that caters to yours. Or you could stick around and try to realign the entire game's aesthetics to your preferences. That qualifies as a personality, if only barely.

It's weird to point out the differences between real life and a video game and then cite a movie and a television show, since there is a huge difference between a finite narrative work written by a single individual, and an ongoing community-base game. I don't like quite a few of the artistic choices the designers have made but I also realise I share this space with others and some do like those choices. What next, are we going to police people's choice of dyes as immersion breaking? It's a pretty important life skill to learn to tolerate aesthetic difference in a community.

To the "incoherent design" people: the real world must really kitten you off with everyone just dressing how they want instead of coordinating with each other to achieve a unified artistic vision. Real world fashion breaks my immersion too.

While there are casuals who just want to be carried, there are an equal to greater number of casuals who, because they are casuals, don't know the encounters or even where to look them up. Someone who has researched an encounter and practiced their rotation is hardly a casual in the broadest sense and the wiki/metabattle shouldn't be considered required reading to play the game (though they are massively helpful). If people were more upfront, patient, and polite, none of this would be a problem; nobody owes you their time, and everyone was a beginner at some point.

I’m considering skill floor as well as ceiling, but my approach here is more exploratory, I don’t pretend to have the answers. Personally, I don’t use Celestial, but I doubt it would make or break me in most cases, because speed and tactical choices seem to matter more. It might change the way I play, but I doubt it would win fights for me that I would have otherwise lost. And in those cases, things were probably super close anyway, no? If the claim is that “all other things being equal” Celestial is better, that could be an issue, but is it actually the case that Celestial turns a low skill player into someone competitive? Does it just close the gap? If so, by how much? Maybe stats shouldn’t matter at all and PvP should be purely skill-based.

Except that Celestial is not the best choice for every build. A glass cannon Power build wouldn’t be better off with Celestial, would it?

Is the issue that Celestial allows players to survive longer than they should (whatever “should” means), or that it allows them to kill players they should not be able to (whatever “should not” means)? I’m not particularly worried about a stat combination that gives a less skilled player small amounts of additional survival so long as it requires sacrifice in their damage. Maybe Celestial isn’t a big enough sacrifice, but it doesn’t seem like it’s letting terrible players dominate. “It took me too long to kill this noob I dismounted on their way to a zerg” does not strike me as a compelling balance request. I expect to be killed by better players, but I expect to have that battle last long enough that I can figure out what’s going on. Go mow down pocket raptors for a power trip?

It’s probably worth re-evaluating how all stats are balanced against each other, assuming this hasn’t already been done. In PvE there are occasionally complaints about how Power is dependent on two stats (Precision and Ferocity) whereas Condition Damage is dependent on just one (Expertise). This, the claim goes, allows condition builds to be tankier without sacrificing as much DPS. I don’t know if the maths bears this out, but if so, it would be an example of a wonky stat system that hasn’t found a balance yet. I assume the complaints about Celestial originate from small scale PvP encounters, but in a way, this approach makes perfect sense; having a fully hybridised stat spread gives you a general flexibility in a context where you can never be sure what you’ll face. This makes two things clear to me: a) if only certain professions tend to use (or “abuse”, if such a word is applicable) Celestial, is it that they get more out of it than other classes or lose more if they don’t, and b) how strange it is to accuse people who use Celestial as paying-to-win as if superior players couldn’t just use Celestial as well and have all those advantages plus their “superior playing skills”.

This is reasonable in theory, but in practice the tricky part is operationalising “too OP”. How do we measure the target of our nerfs/buffs? It can’t simply be anecdotal, but I struggle to see what kind of metric you could use that wouldn’t just favour some other stat combination. An obvious case would be if Celestial was the de facto choice for every profession in every role, but that’s not what we’re talking about here, is it? If you look at the current WvW, is Celestial overrepresented? By that standard, are any professions overrepresented? What about underrepresented? The problem with coming to the forums for nerfs in the sake of balance is that balance is achieved holistically, not just for the one thing that’s annoying for you. I wonder how many people would be happy to have their target nerfed but also their own profession nerfed in order to achieve balance?

Certain people will complain and keep complaining so long as they aren’t having fun. Unfortunately for the rest of us, some subset of these people have very specific requirements about how long a fight should last and who should win (spoiler alert: it’s not you). Anything that doesn’t fall in line with these expectations is problematic and should be removed.

I hear that, and I wish we lived in a world where companies could just be honest about their decision-making (companies, governments, even regular people), but I think you can appreciate why they can’t. I can’t think of any company that would expose their internal mechanisms to that level of scrutiny in order to reassure their customers that they were doing their best.

I am not in a position to discuss ANet’s resources, or whether they can spare personnel to have regular back-and-forth discussions with their community, but I can imagine if they aren’t doing it it’s either because they can’t afford it, or it doesn’t provide adequate value for money. I couldn’t even say at what level this evaluation would be done, since different companies have different planning/budgetary structures. What I can say, is that even if they could do it, these channels can be a trap; while it sounds obvious to put designers/developers in direct contact with users/consumers, this can lead to a lot less work being done and project plan railroading. In a perfect world this wouldn’t be the case, but I just can’t see how an open dialogue like this would work given the amount of users versus the amount of devs/pr reps. Either the discussions would be very superficial, or ANet would bleed tons of resources talking about features they wouldn’t have the money to implement. A one-way “suggestion box” format like the forums (with occasional roadmaps) is probably the best you can hope for.

I’m responding to the idea that if people don’t feel heard they are more likely to quit. This may in fact be true, but it’s a consequence of people feeling like they have a seat at the table when it comes to design and that’s not how it works. This belief sets unreasonable expectations. Maybe ANet is partly responsible for setting these expectations, I couldn’t really say. Is feedback important for software development? Of course. Is communication important for customer relations? Of course. Does feedback imply users will get what they want? Of course not. Are developers under any obligation to provide a response to feedback in order for people to understand what was considered and what the methodology was used. Of course not. My point was simply: vocal users getting what they want does not necessarily mean a better game or healthier population. People threatening to quit if their feedback isn’t implemented, or if they don’t feel like it was considered, is a weird way to look at product development and frankly sounds like the view fuelled by ignorance of the product design process. I don’t want a product designed by the players of GW2 based on their experiences with the game, I want a product designed by ANet (until I don’t). Maybe you feel none of this has to do with your point, which is fair and you are free to ignore it if so. Sorry if it’s tangential. Note: some companies are better at setting/managing user expectations, or of appealing to their users for feedback, and ANet could definitely use improvements in this area.

For every grievance you have, there is likely another grievance that would be created by just doing exactly what you think needs to be done. That doesn't make you wrong, it just makes feedbacj tricky. While customer feedback is important, running design like an informal democracy of the loudest aggrieved forum member is not a good strategy. No successful company is run like this. That's not how feedback works, unless you're comfortable with being held personally accountable if your suggestion fails spectacularly?

It’s weird to come to a forum, post an opinion about development processes you are unlikely to have eyes on, and then be surprised that people respond to the opinion. What did -you- expect would happen? I’m not saying feedback is useless, but this feedback doesn’t seem like something ArenaNet can use to improve your experience because it seems to assume a level of knowledge and expertise beyond personal preference. Maybe they already agree with you but are hamstrung by processes and budget constraints you aren’t aware of. You don’t need to feel sorry for them, but maybe you aren’t in a position to give them constructive advice about their development process? There are things I don’t prefer about this game, but those are largely idiosyncratic and I can’t claim they would make the game better for everyone. I try to charitably imagine what ArenaNet could do with my feedback and try not to get too worked up about their decisions.

MMO players can be like fans of a TV series or movie franchise: they spend so much time in the fandom that it becomes a part of their identity so they feel an ownership of the management and direction of the product and the company that produces it. And in many cases, these fans do not have the business or development experience to actually contribute any meaningful at that level, they just know what they want. And that’s fine so long as they remember how to emotionally disengage. But easier said than done. It’s not just a product to them anymore, it’s a major part of their life. This is probably deeply unhealthy; enjoy a thing, until you don’t, then go outside and touch grass until someone builds something more to your liking. It’s more likely you’ll find a better thing for you out there than redirect the course of an entire company with a forum post.

The forums are a mess because people burst on stage, claim they speak for the entire community, claim that this one change will break everything, and claim that they have the only viable solution. There are so many duplicate threads arguing the same issues to death, with the same “assertion as argument” approach, that nothing every really gets resolved.

In some of the previous threads of this sort, this distinction is more clearly drawn: “Stealth is balanced, but not fun” versus “Stealth is overpowered, and therefore not fun”. If the question is about why Thieves are hated, your explanation is very persuasive. If the question is whether or not that should be the case… that’s another question perhaps.

If you see it only from the non-Thief perspective, your opponent is invincible and can kill you whenever they choose, if they so choose. The evidence that this is not the case is that the meta is not Always-Thief.

There are lots of things other professions can do to create that feeling, for example, Ranger Rapid Fire. Feeling powerless to change your situation is also how every beginner feels when thrown up against an opponent of vastly superior skill. For whatever reason, being frustrated by a Thief is an unacceptable design flaw, but being deleted almost instantly by another player beyond your attack range is a learn2play moment. 🤷🏻‍♂️ N.B., I don’t think Rapid Fire should be nerfed.

Thief isn’t an easy way to win, it’s just an annoying way to not lose. There isn’t enough advantage to get people to reroll, and there is no immediate, easy to access to advantage by rerolling. Hate Guardians and Necros? You could call for nerfs, but easier to just make one. Hate Thieves? Well, easier to hope someone gets rid of them because why would you want to play that?

Just to clarify: nobody is “mad” or “offended”, they just wish you’d put a hold on toxic gatekeeping and constructively contribute. And no, it’s not because they don’t meet your imagined requirements, it’s because trying to kick people out of a conversation doesn’t add anything of value. High sPvP rank doesn’t necessarily translate into being a helpful contributor to game design. If you’re proving anything, it’s that.

Clearly the minimum requirement for an opinion here is access to a keyboard, and little else. I agree with you, that requirement is proving exceptionally low.

While players should not be forced into content they’d rather not play, it’s okay for the game to encourage a little cross-mode exploration. This exploration should be rewarded, but that means that if you absolutely hate leaving your mode, you won’t have access to every reward. Which is fine.