Follow up to the June 28 Balance Update Preview

[megamino.1430]

1 hour ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hey folks - I've been in and out of meetings today, apologies for delay. Here's some responses to questions I've seen repeated a few times:

Hmmm... I still don't understand that if you know that some of the players will not "agree" then what's your action on it? With this response I assume that "we will continue on what we believe on, and we don't really care with your feedback because we have our own design philosophy and you need to agree with us"

Well, for me, just a simple revisit or delay would be suffice and this is caused by you guys, not us players. I know that anet have roadmap etc... but personally I appreciate the delay and revisit the numbers again rather than just "release it and see you later next time we visit profession balance patch, adios friends."

OR

If you guys willing to revisit the calculation and give it like 1 or 2 weeks worth of patch to re-balance and re-thinking of the design philosophy again because I know that this is your game but you guys are creating it for us, or maybe WITH us. I don't know i can be rambling nonsense at this point.

Good Luck Anet for the future. 

[Wiseguy One.1782]

I feel reasonably confident I am not alone in this sentiment when I say as a community, we would rather have a significant delay to all current items set to be released with this patch and all future patches pushed out a few weeks then have this patch go live. It is a foolish move to release something everybody knows is broken and made with not the best intentions in the heart and mind of the team and/or individual responsible for its creation and decisions. 

 

We would much rather kick the can down the road, review everything changes, keep the items of value and positive feedback, trash can the items made with malice and drop a patch the majority can be proud of and happy about. Will everybody be happy and pleased, of course not but its pretty obvious the majority are highly against this one. 

 

As for the team and/or individuals responsible for the malice, lets address the elephant in the room with the discord leaks, I will not advocate for their termination or even severe punishments but they should have a rather severe discussion with their leadership on how to conduct themselves in proper ways and should consider a different position within Arenanet itself. Again, no termination, but perhaps a lateral to another area might be in order because now as a community, there is a good chance after these leaks this team and/or individual may never be trusted to complete this type of update again. 

 

In summary, delay everything a few weeks if necessary and release a patch everyone can be proud of. We as a community would much rather have a few weeks of delays on everything present and future than a patch that has the potential to cause more harm than has already been done.

 

-Wiseguy One

[draxynnic.3719]

@Josh Davis.7865

 

Thanks for taking the time to give us these updates! It looks like you're at least aware of the issues and the pain points regarding this upcoming patch, and the framework provided (gathering feedback from more sources in the future, and planning for an additional balance patch in the near future to revert the more egregious changes) does look like an appropriate response.

One aspect that is driving cynicism here, though, is that there's been a track record now of statements that something would be done, on which the player base has been waiting for far too long now. To give some examples, it was promised with the 300s traits that this was a stopgap measure to get them out of competitive play and that new traits would be made to replace them - not only has this not happened, but a new one was introduced on Spectre in EoD. The blanket "CC skills do no damage in competitive" patch was also supposed to be followed by a review to see if some weapons and professions were hit too harshly by that change - well, it's pretty much commonly acknowledged that warrior in particular was because warrior's original design relied much more heavily on doing damage with the same skill that it CC'd with than other professions, but there's been no sign of any effort to rectify this (say, by increasing the damage on other skills on mace and hammer so they can follow up after a CC). I think the community generally accepts the "we understand this probably isn't ideal, we'll follow up and address the problems afterwards" - but you have to have that followup in a timely fashion. When people are waiting for, literally, years, they're going to get antsy.

Another is, that there's been a perception for a while that some professions are the balance team's favourites, while others are hated by the balance team. I've personally maintained that part of this is that professions like guardian and necromancer have solid cores such that provide a good foundation for elite specialisations and many others are still getting there, and I still think that's a significant factor, but the leak... pretty much confirms that perception. And, apart from weird things like removing the quickness and alacrity wells and forcing boon chronomancer to always have shield (and basically removing quickness and alacrity altogether from any chronomancer that doesn't specialise), the general trend of the upcoming changes is that the new support roles that you're trying to create - alacrity tempest, quickness herald, quickness warrior, I'm not sure about alacrity ranger - are just too overcautious to compete with existing options. While I don't think anyone expects perfection on the first try, you really need to have a common target that everyone is being aimed towards, rather than having some professions having to make painful tradeoffs for everything they get while others get everything and a deluxe kitchen sink. Or, to put it bluntly: Either the capabilities of firebrand and mechanist in high-end content now is an appropriate power level for those roles, and other profession's support roles should be aimed at a level that can realistically compete with them, or they and other strong builds need to be nerfed down towards the same target that you're trying to bring other professions to. On that matter, you should probably seek to make sure that every profession genuinely has a voice at the table in balance discussions in general.  

With all that said, it does look like you're laying a groundwork for an approach that has the opportunity to resolve these issues. Earlier patch previews should, at least, prevent the "unsummon patch notes" type responses from coming too late to do anything about it, and drawing from a wider pool of feedback in general should help to keep you more aware of where the various pain points are so that you can do something about them in a reasonably timely fashion. More information on the balance principles would also help to establish where the balance aiming point (such as that referred to in my previous paragraph) is, so that players can know what you're aiming for and direct feedback accordingly. All in all, I think if you properly follow through, there's an opportunity to clear up a lot of the discontent that has been brewing for years, as long as solid steps are taken to make sure that the status quo of the past couple of years is broken.

[padreadamo.3986]

There is a major disconnect, as admitted, with the philosophy of the balance team and the philosophy of the player base. This essentially means that you do not have a product. This vision should align with the majority of players. The philosophy taking place tomorrow is a failure in understanding the Guild Wars 2 community as a whole.

 

My playgroup and I are really at a loss for words. To know that I gave up Engineer because a particular developer didn't like "kits" or because I always thought we were a joke, "Purity of Purpose" is actually all TRUTH. My feelings were dead-on. I switched to Warrior and now I'm in the same boat. It's a really unfortunate turn of events.

 

Players seem to expect some very basic things from the balance team:

-acknowledge feedback and use some of it every now and then; the profession forums are full of neat ideas

-replace old class design/traits with new ones, especially ones that are underutilized

-bring overbearing skills down and bring underperforming skills UP

-far more frequent changes to trait-lines etc

 

I don't hear people from the rooftops saying they want homogenous professions. What's the point of professions at that point? 

 

There needs to be a fair amount of bridge-building after all of this.

 

 

[mindcircus.1506]

10 minutes ago, Serpiente.4510 said:

Which MMOs do this?

Many. Eve, WoW... even City of Heroes private server Homecoming has a test server.

The sad reality is that for every 20 people saying "we need a test server to help test these changes":

10 people won't do it because their time/effort will not lead to loot/progress on their live account

5 people will will go check it out just to play with the new toys early

4 people will log in to look for exploits they can use hoping wont be fixed before it goes live that they can profit from

1 person will actually...you know... test
And for every 100 of that last type of person...maybe 5 will offer salient feedback.

[Berune.7408]

1 hour ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hey folks - I've been in and out of meetings today, apologies for delay. Here's some responses to questions I've seen repeated a few times:

 

@Josh Davis.7865 Thank You! I for one appreciate the reply and follow up here and it seems mostly positive to me.

Selfishly, I'm really looking forward to the design notes now, to see how these changes will support the goal of making content more accessible for more players.

[Klypto.1703]

Well, the only kind of thing I was able to do was make an all-white charr and call it a kung fu panda.  If that wasn't the point of this game, I don't know what they were trying to do.  However, we've all heard this song and dance about WvW before but maybe this time not firing the person in charge of WvW right before you have a planned Streaming event for the game mode roflmao.  However, if it does happen, I am going to create an alliance of storage guilds to rise and queue up every map.

[Za Shaloc.3908]

36 minutes ago, Serpiente.4510 said:

Which MMOs do this?

 

Off the top of my head I know that ESO does this, and generally in a batch of 5 separate weekly patches for small iterations over the month. Although the common sentiment seems to be that PTS feedback is often ignored there as well, it's a really great system in theory. 

Edited June 28, 2022 by Za Shaloc.3908

[Archmage Talaftia.9853]

not really sure if you guys really listening to community or feedback , it's just seems like you guys nerfing stuff you dont like, and buffing stuff you enjoy, qcata nerfed , why ? cuz have so much dps while providing quickness, then why qfb not getting touched when its literally 1k damage under qcata ? u gave tempest alac but is also no good, now u have sacrifice 2 good traits to give alac why you guys forcing ele to make a choice while other classes giving alac + other stuff, like ham; heals, alac, stab, aegis. youre also buffed this class btw.like theres already like what 10 ele player left in game , yet you guys keep nerfing it ground , every single patch .

[draxynnic.3719]

17 minutes ago, megamino.1430 said:

Hmmm... I still don't understand that if you know that some of the players will not "agree" then what's your action on it? With this response I assume that "we will continue on what we believe on, and we don't really care with your feedback because we have our own design philosophy and you need to agree with us"

Well, for me, just a simple revisit or delay would be suffice and this is caused by you guys, not us players. I know that anet have roadmap etc... but personally I appreciate the delay and revisit the numbers again rather than just "release it and see you later next time we visit profession balance patch, adios friends."

OR

If you guys willing to revisit the calculation and give it like 1 or 2 weeks worth of patch to re-balance and re-thinking of the design philosophy again because I know that this is your game but you guys are creating it for us, or maybe WITH us. I don't know i can be rambling nonsense at this point.

Good Luck Anet for the future. 

Ideally, it'd be a case of "we'll prioritise getting out fixes or reverts for the major pain points ASARP".

A bad patch for a couple of months isn't that big of a deal, in the greater scheme of things. Not ideal, to be sure, but if it gets fixed, it'll be in the past after that.

It's when bad balancing decisions have a habit of hanging around forever like a bad smell that it's a serious problem.

[Sansar.1302]

Don't do the patch as it is now, guardian and Necro is way to strong 

[Dreggon.6598]

I live in Australia and I usually have between 200-300 ping. A lot of the raid rotations require precisely-timed sequences of keypresses that my latency physically disallows me from doing. The game is balanced around said rotations.

 

I also have trouble with my autoattack chain resetting when I use abilities. I want to use abilities, they're fun. But so much damage is tied to the third attack in auto chains. Mesmer sword and axe are two massive offenders.

 

I feel like the balance changes are looking at symptoms rather than causes. I just want to not be frustrated.

[Amorimm.6732]

Josh “We Hear You” Davis, 

It is amazing that you have completely neglected everything that has happened, while still saying "we hear you" yet blatantly, you don't? If you did this patch would not be released the way it is.

The lack of 'design notes' is not the issue, we don't need the explanation behind why you made what you made, we need you and the whole balance team to see that what you made is completely and utterly terrible.
Actively removing class diversity, buffing classes that do not need further improvement, and the complete neglect towards other classes entirely is absolutely mind bogglingly frustratingly stupid to see. Do none of you actively play this game anymore and just guess at what you think is appropriate?

Having developers hype up a patch for months for it to be literally zero changes to the WvW meta, and only changes to PvE that hurt the game, is just a dismal display.

Can't wait for the next 5 years of "We'll fix it later" attitude, while progressively dulling down the game to the point a  toddler can play it better than a seasoned veteran who actually tries.

Prove me wrong, prove the entire community wrong, show us it'll be better, show us this won't continue. Better yet, show us immediately by reverting the changes in this patch ASAP. 

 

Edited June 28, 2022 by Amorimm.6732

[charles.9052]

You're always telling players what the future holds, so why wait so long?You guys are so slow to update content and balance.I started playing GW2 8 years ago,think about how many things you've promised your players in the past you haven't done? Your arrogance is disrespectful to the players and irresponsible to the game.

[ShionKreth.1542]

The problem with how Guild Wars 2 balancing is that it always comes in big swings and 'reimaginings', rather than small, measured adjustments and shifts. Balancing that way always requires rebalancing down the road, as it never gets it right, and just really upsets players - I personally haven't played a game where the players were so bitter towards the balancing team since Anarchy Online. And honestly, I'm kind of tired of these constant changes; myself. I mean, soulbeast already had it's elite cooldown changed from 60s to 80s just recently, requiring a readjusted rotation, now it's back to 60s but will only do 5-6 hits total... so more readjustment, not to mention that it's not exciting at all anymore, and they clearly have no vision for what they want to achieve so it'll probably just be changed again down the road once we get used to only needing to proc it once a second; it's just taxing. Either the people(person?) handling this need more time to do their job right, or they need all new people doing it.

[Trigg.9402]

@Josh Davis.7865 

How will you monitor community feedback to the balance update tomorrow?

What metric do you use to measure this?

How are you going to measure whether players "enjoy" the incoming dead warrior class tomorrow?

If no one plays it, because no one will, how will you know that what you did made a positive impact and or how to improve the class?

 

According to your own developer, he nerfed the catalyst because he saw a group of top players stack the class to do "insane" damage. Is this your method of collecting community feedback? Is this how you go about in monitoring the impacts of your balance patches? By looking at how the top players perform and then decide they're overperforming and so a nerf to their classes must be done? 

 

You said you are working on ways to include the "community voice".  I cannot stress enough how its time to find a way to actually open up discourse between you and the community, where the community's voice is actually included in these changes, as it is imperative for your reputation and the future of the game's success long-term .

 

Do you think the player-base will look forward to the Fourth Expansion after how little you valued their voice in this balance patch or what they suggested to fix the patch or make it more bearable? Its a direct contradiction to everything you mentioned in your response about valuing the community voice, as you turned right around and said, oh well, we'll just fix it in Mid-fall. 

 

Lets not forget that we are your target audience. You want us to keep coming back for your service. If you change the trajectory of Gw2's, its values and or beliefs and move towards a game model where you'll make the game however you like, then I wish you the best of luck in retaining players. Its no secret that its financially desirable to please your consumers thus after this fiasco and as the game director, I hope you actually direct all your teams to reach the community better. 

[Control.5367]

4 hours ago, schrodingerscat.3872 said:

This is coming from the same guy who asked for a list of GW2 bug fixes from a couple of streamers over a conversation stemming from him being in the same Twitch chat as them. Highly unprofessional. Same with the behaviour and words of that Dev in the leaked discord. 

 

That GW2 bugs document which included fixes to a bunch of speedrunning skips in fractals was made known to my bf Mrmeowgi (one of the few people in this game who invents such skips, with many of HIS skips in that document) and myself. Over the course of several weeks we tried again and again to reach Grouch (who btw accepted Meowgi's friend request on Discord) to try and get an answer on 2 things: 

 

1) What is his vision for the game, specifically, where will speedrunning be in his vision of the game? Because it feels very demoralising, to not only spend hours discovering something, perfecting the technique, and (possibly) hours/days/weeks recording a video getting that perfect take that demonstrates the skip, only for Anet to patch it in this secret document. We thought if we could reach Grouch and talk to him about what he thought of speedrunning we could even work WITH Anet to ensure that the content we put out would be approved, and they would get the benefit of learning what the actual problematic bugs in fractals are, instead of having people who have 0 knowledge in fractals simply copy and paste a bunch of YouTube fractal skips and present them as "high priority bugs to be fixed". 

 

2) If Anet is disapproving of the content we put out (we are in essence "breaking the game"/playing the game in an unintended way - which is the spirit of speedrunning) then we wondered and were concerned: Would Anet one day, all of a sudden, turn around and cite what we were doing was against ToS and ban us? 

 

We got silence. Even though I went as far as to track down Grouch in Teapot's stream (seems he has no problem "communicating"/dropping hints of his vision there, in a streamer's chat of all places), asking him to read Meowgi's DM to him on Discord, to which he replied "KK". Nothing ever came of that.

 

Which after everything we've seen I'm not surprised. And after my personal loss, of losing signet share (which is barely used nowadays anyway, and is used in 0 builds aside from specifically Perfect Inscriptions Heal Firebrand - which in itself takes skill to play well since you drop a lot of passive healing from taking Virtues, which again is ANOTHER sign that Anet doesn't know their own game), all I can feel is just an overwhelming sense of "disappointed but not surprised".

 

Will I be quitting the game entirely? No, I'll still log in for the apocalypse and to get my Harvest Temple CM and infusion, (props to Cameron Rich and his team and the art team respectively). 

And I'll still maybe log in from time to time, but as I saw somewhere else "The story for me has ended, Tyria is safe and they don't need me anymore. I finished the game."

(Edited to clarify and highlight that Meowgi's skips were included in that secret document.)

 

You are the real MVP. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ 

[PookieDaWombat.6209]

2 hours ago, Ulysses.2058 said:

They are not comparable and they know it. What they are actually doing is using a fallacy, placing both people in the same "group" to discredit both at the same time, even if those criticizing the developer vastly outnumber those sending death threats.

Yeah, FDev does/did that a lot, along with some other very toxic behaviors towards their player base on their forums and it has not worked out well for them.  Tanked their stock big time over the last year and honestly, Anet needs to be careful not to repeat those mistakes with dismissive communications like this.

[Myror.7521]

1 hour ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hey folks - I've been in and out of meetings today, apologies for delay. Here's some responses to questions I've seen repeated a few times:

 

Q: Why aren't you holding the update?

This was discussed. The simple answer is that “holding the balance changes” is not feasible from a technical standpoint. We have a very sophisticated dev environment that gives us a lot of flexibility in areas like this, but we're well beyond that point. Now that the build is finalized and nearly ready for activation, unwinding the code and content changes in the June 28 balance update would be a significant and time-intensive effort that would likely result in a multi-week delay of not only the skills content, but also everything else in the release (new Challenge Mode, Core Updates, Mordremoth legendary, etc). Once all the right changes were stripped from the build, we’d need to QA those skills to verify they work as before, and we’d need to QA the rest of the release again to make sure that nothing was inadvertently broken in the process. We usually give QA 1-2 weeks to test a ‘finalized’ build, for reference. This would have a cascading impact on future releases (meaning things like LWS1E3 would also get pushed back).

I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but the least disruptive option is to push the release and address issues in future builds.

Q: There's nothing concrete in this post, what are you doing to fix this?

I get wordy sometimes. Here’s a bullet point list of next steps:

•  The skills and balance team is drafting ‘design notes’ for the June 28 release. We’ll publish these as soon as we can. I don’t expect that you’ll agree with all of it – especially from the conversation we’ve been monitoring – but we owe you the explanations.
• I’m going to own resolving the internal process issue that prevented us from including the design notes upfront.
•  In the coming months, we’re going to publish a blog post that details the balance philosophy for Guild Wars 2.
•  I recognize that the way feedback is collected for balance updates is far from ideal. We need to preview updates earlier so we’re never in this situation again, and we need to solve for how we go about getting balance feedback from qualified individuals. Eliminate the unofficial backchannels. I’m going to own finding the right solution for this.
•  We added a follow up balance update in the coming weeks to our schedule.

I'll note that the post this morning was done at 11:30a on a Monday. We moved quickly and we don't have all of the answers yet.

Q: Why aren't you posting the balance philosophy today? Doesn't it exist?

The philosophy driving profession design and balance has changed a few times over the years, even by the ‘original developers’ of the days of yore. Elite specializations weren’t a part of the game’s original vision, for example. I considered getting a version of this posted in response to this weekend’s discussions, but on further reflection, I came to the conclusion that Cameron Rich taking over as the Lead Systems Designer (which Skills/Balance ultimately falls under) is a great opportunity for us to revisit the discussion internally before making a public statement. Cam brings a lot of great perspective to this area from his experience as the Lead Encounters Designer for GW2. We also recently had Floyd Grubb join the WvW team - and we'd like to have him involved there as well.

 

Q: A balance team was just created after End of Dragons? Why wasn't there a balance team before?

I'd like to clarify my comment. Guild Wars 2 has had a balance team in the past, no doubt. For End of Dragons, our professions designers were asked to turn their full attention towards building elite specializations, which ultimately meant that live balance updates were few and far between. As we were building our dev plans for post-End of Dragons, I felt very strongly that we needed to staff a full-time balance team that supports the live game, even as we're building future expansion content. We're trying to get to a place where we can hit a consistent cadence with the updates, even as other work is in flight.

 

So as mutch as i read all Text in the past days. The reason why the Balance patch is like it is . Is mostly cause the Balance Team is pretty fair new in that sence (since eod means 4 month in). So i would say to the whole community need to give it some more time so the devs could actually learn how exactly the classes/builds/roles are working and then Balance them around the new way they should work.

 

So gl on get that done and hopefully a good or better Balance ubdate next time. Cause i dont see it too easy that my class get interly deleted out of meta anyways (warrior). But u waited like 2+ years for anything good (in pvp at least) so i could also wait for the rest of the time. xd

[megamino.1430]

13 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Ideally, it'd be a case of "we'll prioritise getting out fixes or reverts for the major pain points ASARP".

A bad patch for a couple of months isn't that big of a deal, in the greater scheme of things. Not ideal, to be sure, but if it gets fixed, it'll be in the past after that.

It's when bad balancing decisions have a habit of hanging around forever like a bad smell that it's a serious problem.

I hope that Anet seriously considering this thing... I read that players like the "new" Anet now, I've been hanging around for less than half a year so there's that... I presume that the design philosophy notes will not bring players together and it will create dev vs players mentality at the end, that's my hot take anyway. It depends on how they "design" the design note anyway.

[Aleira.8341]

8 hours ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

called for developers to be fired

So asking for someone who speaks down on players, who makes changes based on what he prefers instead of listening to the feedback, who makes changes to game modes he doesn't even play and all in all not doing his job properly and making the game worse for the players both long- and short-term, is equivalent to wishing death upon someone? Got you. Well, I guess I am not welcome in this community anymore then, and will take my leave.

[Kiraiami.6910]

What are you going to do differently this time? These promises were already made in the past, and you did not commit to them. 

[Jski.6180]

My main question is what this update made with the same ideal as feb 2020 update? This is what ppl though was coming a jun 2022 update an update that only comes onces every 2 years it seems with some follow up updates such as your fall update.

[Sansar.1302]

Feels like a net refuse to nerf guardian and necro , i dont need the desige choises explained i need that classes that overpreform is brougth back in power so they dont overshine all other.

[Luno.2638]

Quote

Finally, I’d like to thank those of you who have approached this discussion in a civil manner. To those that have chosen extreme toxicity, called for developers to be fired, or sent death threats–you're not welcome in our community.

Thank you for saying this, in particular. The gaming community has a history of having their toxic, unhinged behavior enabled for way too long (Frankly, this includes by ArenaNet in the past), so it's heartening to see a director stand up for their team instead of throwing them under the bus. Video game communities would be a lot better if every developer was this intentional and surefooted about not tolerating toxicity.

Can you imagine people reacting this way for an equally minor thing in any other artistic medium? The way people use language like "consumer" and "customer" as a cudgel to demand they get exactly what they want is so unhealthy and disingenuous. Bunch of Karens demanding to speak to the manager because an employee dared to not lick every boot that comes their way

To the community: This isn't a utility product, folks, it's entertainment. It's subjective. It's art. It's in constant flux. Your disappointment in changes is valid. Your constructive feedback is valid. But the moment that you start harassing and threatening developers, your feedback loses all its value. Developers are people, and they are artists. They aren't making sure your car doesn't explode when it starts. They are making a silly fantasy video game. They are allowed to be human, act human, and have human opinions. That does not invalidate their expertise. So try to be better humans back at them--it will honestly make it far easier for you to have a positive influence on the experience.

Edited June 28, 2022 by Luno.2638