A Guide to providing infinite content for a whole playerbase with 1 intern - Please Arenanet, pleaaase

[Philalive.8654]

Hello!

I'd just like to point something out looking at some other online games that are very successful.

Case study 1: League of Legends

How often does League of Legends add new content to the game? Very expensive story instances? New raids, zones, maps with detailed 3D models, audio design, etc, etc? Well, I'm no expert but aside from some for-fun gamemodes they've had 1 map (with lots of small changes and 1 big visual rework) since 2009 (RiP Twisted Treeline, and the other one). So what kind of updates do Riot Games provide their (multiple orders of magnitude) more popular and long-living game? 

Some new champions every now and then but mostly Balance Patches. Just, simple, balance patches, most of which are just tuning numbers. A quick google search gives us this link: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/tags/patch-notes/

Here you can clearly see that they release balance patches every 2 weeks or so. Big patches that keep the game fresh. But Riot Games is a big company, they have a lot of employees and way more resources than Arenanet, probably true, fair enough.

 

Case study 2: Defense of the Ancients (DotA) 2

How does Valve keep their insanely large playerbase engaged for so long? What do their updates look like? New raid every month? New story every day?

Well actually, they have the same, singular map that they've had since... 2005? Something like that? And actually the updates that they do, along with new heroes every now and then are... BALANCE PATCHES. Crazy right? There has to be something magical about these mysterious "Balance Patches", as a Guild Wars 2 player myself I'm not very familiar with them, I thought they were extremely rare for some reason.

Now, you might say that, yeah but Valve is also a big company that figured out how to legally print money with the least amount of effort, so how many people are working on DotA? They have to have Artists, 3D designers to make all the skins, developers that code all the new Heroes and features, fix all the bugs, etc. It's a massive game with about a million concurrent players every day, that requires a massive team, right?

Well according to this source: https://afkgaming.com/dota2/news/valve-employee-reveals-the-number-of-people-working-on-dota-2

"Valve’s Jeff Hill says 30 more people work in conjunction with him on Dota 2". With some quick maffs I can deduce that there are 31 people working on DotA 2.

 

While I've been quite sarcastic so far, I just feel like someone has to get through to Arenanet and explain to them why successful games do balance patches, it's not to chase some perfect balance where things are perfect, they're not even shooting for perfect. Their whole goal with changing stuff is to make new stuff overpowered and shift the meta as often as possible (within reason). League of Legends releases a massive shakeup with a complete system rework every year (like item rework, champion health rework, etc) to very purposefully completely destroy the "balance" they've tried to achieve the last 12 months. It's not about finding the perfect anything it's about keeping the game interesting and fun!

What we have right now in Guild Wars 2 is a static and boring meta-game, it's barely evolving when it should be an exciting part of the game! I love making builds in this game but there's only so much fun you can milk out of a system that goes unchanged for years. You know what will make old content like Raids, Dungeons, Fractals, Open-World, literally anything feel fresh and fun again? Less powercreep that makes old content ultra easy an.. Sorry that's another topic. BALANCE PATCHES. This is 10x more true for PvP and WvW, they don't care at all about the new expansion, the new story or whatever you have cooking right now. The most interesting update WvW players have had recently (and I'm including word resturcturing/alliance here) was the introdruction of MESMER RIFLE and before that it was... hmm let met think... Vindicator was a pretty big deal...

I'm more excited about balance patches than I am any expansion, the only thing that excites me for the coming expansion is the new weapons? skills? traits? combat thingy? whatever we're getting.

You don't even have to make good or even intelligent changes, just change something and go from there, if you kitten something up there's no rule that says you have to wait until the next quater to fix it. League has bi-weekly balance patches that are small changes but only sometimes intelligent, why can't we have the same? I just want the game to feel a little bit more fresh.

 

I'll end this rant on a quote from a videogamedunkey video

"Games like this are far and few between, so I want them to get this one just right, and the good news is that most of the problems with Elden Ring (Guild Wars 2) can be fixed by one dude with a slider tool"

 

Thanks

Edited May 26 by Philalive.8654

[Farohna.6247]

I personally don't think this improves or fixes anything in GW2.  Most of the player base does not seem to like when things are "shaken up" or having to re-do their build every patch or being subjectively forced to play a different profession after spending many, many hours on one you love. 

Neither game you gave examples with are MMORPGs, and therefore have different ideas of what balance is and have different needs.  An RPG needs content, story, maps, etc. to create an immersive world.  

Some things need to be tweaked, power creep is real, and other things need to be left alone.  WvW and PvP need some love, but I'm guessing they're not considered the bread and butter of the game and therefore not the priority.  

If we're talking about things like adjusting the world boss difficulty, i.e. Shadow Behemoth, then I could see adjusting more of those.  Please don't make me adjust my builds every week though, icky.  

[Philalive.8654]

44 minutes ago, Farohna.6247 said:

I personally don't think this improves or fixes anything in GW2.  Most of the player base does not seem to like when things are "shaken up" or having to re-do their build every patch or being subjectively forced to play a different profession after spending many, many hours on one you love. 

Neither game you gave examples with are MMORPGs, and therefore have different ideas of what balance is and have different needs.  An RPG needs content, story, maps, etc. to create an immersive world.  

Some things need to be tweaked, power creep is real, and other things need to be left alone.  WvW and PvP need some love, but I'm guessing they're not considered the bread and butter of the game and therefore not the priority.  

If we're talking about things like adjusting the world boss difficulty, i.e. Shadow Behemoth, then I could see adjusting more of those.  Please don't make me adjust my builds every week though, icky.  

"I personally don't think this improves or fixes anything in GW2."

I respect that it's not high up on the list of problems for everyone. For me however it is the one thing that frustrates the most about this game. What I find the most fun in this game is new and interesting ideas for my character, it gets stale to just play the same build for years and years.

 

"Most of the player base does not seem to like when things are "shaken up""

I disagree with this, but I think it's very subjective depending on what circles you run in. There are probably a fair amount of people on both sides.

 

"having to re-do their build every patch or being subjectively forced to play a different profession after spending many, many hours on one you love. "

Nothing I said in this post goes against this. I couldn't agree with you more that no one should have to re-do their build every patch, and no one should feel pressure to reroll to another profession. I am probably the biggest advocate for playing just a main (I hate alts). I think we have different ideas of what balance patches should look like though, I am not advocating for them to butcher, remove or even change solidified builds that much. I think they should adjust things more frequently to promote more build diversity but I don't think they should ever, for example, make Condition Virtuoso unplayable or bad.

This goes with my examples as well, if you're a League of Legends or a DotA 2 player obviously no one wants to see a Hero/Champion get nerfed into the ground and become unplayable, you should always be able to play your favourite Hero and Champion but that doesn't mean that it should be a part of the meta-game cycle where sometimes your character will be powerful and "in-meta" and sometimes it'll be outside the meta. Most of the changes they make in their balance patches are small, generally way smaller than the balance patches we get in Guild Wars 2.

There are countless examples of traits, utility, heal and elite skills that are more or less completely dead. We can start there and make small changes to underperforming skills and traits without being so scared to do the wrong thing and not having to deal with 1000 changes all at once. It's better if we have huge change-ups for things like Expansion releases and then keep the game fun and interesting in the downtime with smaller more consistent patches that make some builds viable and adjust the ones that we've already solidified and love.

The fact of "being subjectively forced to play a different profession" is (almost) uniquely a Guild Wars 2 thing. I've played a lot of other MMOs and for example, if you're playing World of Warcraft and you're a Frost Mage, it's not like you all of a sudden get deleted and have to reroll after a patch comes out, especially if you're not playing in top 0.1% guilds/groups.

I also believe that a big reason why people feel forced to reroll as soon as a build becomes "bad" or goes forgotten and thus underperforms is because you know that it's probably not going to be fixed next week, it's probably not even going to get touched on the next quarterly update, you might be out for 6 months until the balance team remembers to buff it back up. It's easier to stomach your preferred build/spec/class being bad for a few weeks if you know that there will at least be some changes in the near future (not 3-6, even 9 months away).

 

"Neither game you gave examples with are MMORPGs, and therefore have different ideas of what balance is and have different needs."

I can add more examples to my list if the MOBA comparison isn't good enough for you, World of Warcraft: Classic - Season of Discovery. What did they do there? They took what they knew was a winning formula and a good baseline (like I think Guild Wars 2 has), and added stuff to freshen it up and shake up the balance. They didn't delete any builds or specs, a Sublety Rogue is still a Sublety Rogue but they change things up every couple of months or so. Most of the "new raids" are old dungeons + an intern with a slider tool and a keyboard with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Although I'm not saying we should add new super overpowered abilities to every class in Guild Wars 2 but I really do believe the concept of shaking things up for players and allowing new and exciting builds to flourish etc still works well as a comparison here.

Another example is retail World of Warcraft, they completely change up and rework massive parts of every class and specilization every expansion. However they, very importantly still keep an Arms Warrior as an Arms Warrior. They also have much more frequent balance patches, esp. concerning PvP. Every new Mythic+ season is a huge change-up and everyone's super excited to play old content but in a fresh light with new exciting builds and strategies.

I disagree with the idea that MOBAs and MMOs should have different ideas of what balance is. You do balance to keep the game somewhat fair but it's also important to keep it fresh and exciting. If they released the game perfectly balanced in 2012 and never changed it the game would be dead several times over now. The reason people loved the new Elite Specilizations every expansion is because they shook up the meta and the entire game in so many ways. Obviously you can't do that every couple of weeks but you also can't let the game go stale and boring for large parts of the playerbase.

 

"An RPG needs content, story, maps, etc. to create an immersive world."

I wholeheartedly agree. No reason you can't have consistent and more frequent balance patches too. It doesn't require even a 100th as many resources compared to all the new "MMO" content we're getting, it's a cheap big plus for some though.

 

"Some things need to be tweaked, power creep is real, and other things need to be left alone.  WvW and PvP need some love, but I'm guessing they're not considered the bread and butter of the game and therefore not the priority."

Again, I completely agree with you here. Tweak some things, probably don't power creep us up to 50k DPS (we could go back to chillin' under 40k too), and leave good, working things alone until the rest of the game has caught up.

WvW and PvP does need some love and I understand completely that Arenanet can't devote big resources to these gamemodes but I think I speak for most of the dedicated WvW community when I say that: "World Restructuring is nice but I'd rather have a balance patch focused on WvW. " and it'd probably be 100x cheaper for Arenanet too.

Edited May 26 by Philalive.8654

[Farohna.6247]

13 minutes ago, Philalive.8654 said:

"I personally don't think this improves or fixes anything in GW2."

I respect that it's not high up on the list of problems for everyone. For me however it is the one thing that frustrates the most about this game. What I find the most fun in this game is new and interesting ideas for my character, it gets stale to just play the same build for years and years.

 

"Most of the player base does not seem to like when things are "shaken up""

I disagree with this, but I think it's very subjective depending on what circles you run in. There are probably a fair amount of people on both sides.

 

"having to re-do their build every patch or being subjectively forced to play a different profession after spending many, many hours on one you love. "

Nothing I said in this post goes against this. I couldn't agree with you more that no one should have to re-do their build every patch, and no one should feel pressure to reroll to another profession. I am probably the biggest advocate for playing just a main (I hate alts). I think we have different ideas of what balance patches should look like though, I am not advocating for them to butcher, remove or even change solidified builds that much. I think they should adjust things more frequently to promote more build diversity but I don't think they should ever, for example, make Condition Virtuoso unplayable or bad.

This goes with my examples as well, if you're a League of Legends or a DotA 2 player obviously no one wants to see a Hero/Champion get nerfed into the ground and become unplayable, you should always be able to play your favourite Hero and Champion but that doesn't mean that it should be a part of the meta-game cycle where sometimes your character will be powerful and "in-meta" and sometimes it'll be outside the meta. Most of the changes they make in their balance patches are small, generally way smaller than the balance patches we get in Guild Wars 2.

There are countless examples of traits, utility, heal and elite skills that are more or less completely dead. We can start there and make small changes to underperforming skills and traits without being so scared to do the wrong thing and not having to deal with 1000 changes all at once. It's better if we have huge change-ups for things like Expansion releases and then keep the game fun and interesting in the downtime with smaller more consistent patches that make some builds viable and adjust the ones that we've already solidified and love.

The fact of "being subjectively forced to play a different profession" is (almost) uniquely a Guild Wars 2 thing. I've played a lot of other MMOs and for example, if you're playing World of Warcraft and you're a Frost Mage, it's not like you all of a sudden get deleted and have to reroll after a patch comes out, especially if you're not playing in top 0.1% guilds/groups.

I also believe that a big reason why people feel forced to reroll as soon as a build becomes "bad" or goes forgotten and thus underperforms is because you know that it's probably not going to be fixed next week, it's probably not even going to get touched on the next quarterly update, you might be out for 6 months until the balance team remembers to buff it back up. It's easier to stomach your preferred build/spec/class being bad for a few weeks if you know that there will at least be some changes in the near future (not 3-6, even 9 months away).

 

"Neither game you gave examples with are MMORPGs, and therefore have different ideas of what balance is and have different needs."

I can add more examples to my list if the MOBA comparison isn't good enough for you, World of Warcraft: Classic - Season of Discovery. What did they do there? They took what they knew was a winning formula and a good baseline (like I think Guild Wars 2 has), and added stuff to freshen it up and shake up the balance. They didn't delete any builds or specs, a Sublety Rogue is still a Sublety Rogue but they change things up every couple of months or so. Most of the "new raids" are old dungeons + an intern with a slider tool and a keyboard with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Although I'm not saying we should add new super overpowered abilities to every class in Guild Wars 2 but I really do believe the concept of shaking things up for players and allowing new and exciting builds to flourish etc still works well as a comparison here.

Another example is retail World of Warcraft, they completely change up and rework massive parts of every class and specilization every expansion. However they, very importantly still keep an Arms Warrior as an Arms Warrior. They also have much more frequent balance patches, esp. concerning PvP. Every new Mythic+ season is a huge change-up and everyone's super excited to play old content but in a fresh light with new exciting builds and strategies.

I disagree with the idea that MOBAs and MMOs should have different ideas of what balance is. You do balance to keep the game somewhat fair but it's also important to keep it fresh and exciting. If they released the game perfectly balanced in 2012 and never changed it the game would be dead several times over now. The reason people loved the new Elite Specilizations every expansion is because they shook up the meta and the entire game in so many ways. Obviously you can't do that every couple of weeks but you also can't let the game go stale and boring for large parts of the playerbase.

 

"An RPG needs content, story, maps, etc. to create an immersive world."

I wholeheartedly agree. No reason you can't have consistent and more frequent balance patches too. It doesn't require even a 100th as many resources compared to all the new "MMO" content we're getting, it's a cheap big plus for some though.

 

"Some things need to be tweaked, power creep is real, and other things need to be left alone.  WvW and PvP need some love, but I'm guessing they're not considered the bread and butter of the game and therefore not the priority."

Again, I completely agree with you here. Tweak some things, probably don't power creep us up to 50k DPS (we could go back to chillin' under 40k too), and leave good, working things alone until the rest of the game has caught up.

WvW and PvP does need some love and I understand completely that Arenanet can't devote big resources to these gamemodes but I think I speak for most of the dedicated WvW community when I say that: "World Restructuring is nice but I'd rather have a balance patch focused on WvW. " and it'd probably be 100x cheaper for Arenanet too.

I appreciate your replies!  We agree on the majority.  

Your example of WoW and having to reroll because you're not in the top DPS struck up some memories for me.  Patches absolutely irked many players in WoW, as did expansion changes in classes.  The infamous flavor of the month.  I can not count the number of times I would have to switch from beast mastery to survival to marksman depending on what the strongest DPS was at the moment.  You learn to adapt and flex but it's very tiring sometimes to be enjoying the gameplay and how you want to play only to have it no longer viable.   Patches were used to nerf over powered classes.  

Patches should be about fine tuning.   Balancing out things that make one drastically over or under perform.   I think my biggest concern would be that the format you are suggesting for more frequent balancing would end up as Anet making a very large mess of unplayable builds and a lot of player frustration. 

[Philalive.8654]

12 minutes ago, Farohna.6247 said:

I appreciate your replies!  We agree on the majority.  

Your example of WoW and having to reroll because you're not in the top DPS struck up some memories for me.  Patches absolutely irked many players in WoW, as did expansion changes in classes.  The infamous flavor of the month.  I can not count the number of times I would have to switch from beast mastery to survival to marksman depending on what the strongest DPS was at the moment.  You learn to adapt and flex but it's very tiring sometimes to be enjoying the gameplay and how you want to play only to have it no longer viable.   Patches were used to nerf over powered classes.  

Patches should be about fine tuning.   Balancing out things that make one drastically over or under perform.   I think my biggest concern would be that the format you are suggesting for more frequent balancing would end up as Anet making a very large mess of unplayable builds and a lot of player frustration. 

Yeah it's true that the comparison to WoW is not perfect really... they've had a lot of issues and made some real big mistakes in their history. I just think the cost-to-reward ratio for more investment into balancing has to be good. I really do believe that one guy with a slider tool could do a lot of cool things with this game. However I recognise that I probably don't represent the largest demographic in this game saying that.

At the end of the day though I think I speak for a large part of the community when I say that there should be more focus on balance, we can't have a single balance patch once a quarter that changes the cooldown of some (largely unused) abilities in only PvE. They're not bad changes and some tweaks are really good and have some punch, it's just way too little, way too late. If you disregard the changes to cooldowns for defensive utilities in PvE you're really down to very small granular changes. Which I don't dislike it's just that I'd prefer if we had that say, every month?

My brain just thinks like, ok you're a company with 400 employees. Let's say you have 1 person working on balance half-time for a month. That's about 20 hours per work-week, 80 hours a month. One person on a mission with a whole month, 80 hours and a slider tool could do a lot of good for the game. Maybe I should've focused more on that fact in my post, not necessarily saying we need a balance patch every 2 weeks.

From my point of view, mainly WvW but I do all content on and off, I feel like the WvW meta is on fire (horrible) right now, the last balance patch didn't really fix much of anything and we've all been waiting a quarter for this. It's very underwhelming and disappointing.

I think what you said about not wanting to change everything up every 2 weeks is a good point though, I hadn't really thought that through completely. I personally hate everytime I come back to serious-ish PvE content in Guild Wars 2 and I have to figure out 6 new different builds so I can play something relevant on every boss. Historically the worst part about instanced PvE for me has been things like: This is a POWER only boss and actually Soulbeast does 4x more damage than any other build so you have to play that here. Matthias? Yeah you're playing Mirage or griefing. etc. (a bit of that is self imposed elitism but it's really annoying, I'd like to play my main tyvm)

[Leger.3724]

League of Legends is pvp.

Real people is the content and it will always by unique every game.

MMOs like Guild Wars 2 doesn't have that luxury when it comes to pve. They set up fights so that at 75%, 50%, 25% something happens. The animations of the boss lead to specific outcomes.

Maybe in the future - and maybe Arena Net will pioneer this - with less grinding and more player control over their character the pve fights can be more unique and spontaneous but it will also require a shift in the mindset of pve players.

I'll also point out League of Legends characters have 4 unique abilities and then 2 pickable abilities from a small pool of them. Combat is way more simple. Something Arena Net should be thinking about for GW3. Guild Wars 1 combat being simple with depth was a huge selling point for that game. Guild Wars 2 is a giant spam fest with a much larger skillbar and nothing has been gained in terms of fostering a larger end game playerbase or a larger pvp playerbase.

Edited May 26 by Leger.3724

[Philalive.8654]

5 minutes ago, Leger.3724 said:

League of Legends is pvp.

Real people is the content and it will always by unique every game.

MMOs like Guild Wars 2 doesn't have that luxury when it comes to pve. They set up fights so that at 75%, 50%, 25% something happens. The animations of the boss lead to specific outcomes.

Maybe in the future - and maybe Arena Net will pioneer this - with less grinding and more player control over their character the pve fights can be more unique and spontaneous but it will also require a shift in the mindset of pve players.

I'll also point out League of Legends characters have 4 unique abilities and then 2 pickable abilities from a small pool of them. Combat is way more simple. Something Arena Net should be thinking about for GW3. Guild Wars 1 combat being simple with depth was a huge selling point for that game. Guild Wars 2 is a giant spam fest with a much larger skillbar and nothing has been gained in terms of fostering a larger end game playerbase or a larger pvp playerbase.

I'm not entirely sure how this relates to my argument. I obviously understand that PvP, WvW and games like League of Legends have more inherent replayability than a PvE gamemode.

I'm saying nothing about Boss design, the number of abilities or anything about the combat complexity compared to other games.

My argument here is that balance patches are a cost efficient way of providing more content and a better game for a lot of the playerbase. Balance patches are basically the only content that WvW & PvP players ever get, and I'll bet money some PvE players are waiting for their build to be playable, so it makes sense to put some more focus on it, right now if feels like balance is packed into a box, hidden under a blanket, in the basement, under another box and forgotten about, like chirstmas decorations.

[Zebulous.2934]

Most of the complaints about balance patches get moved to the profession forums.  The most upsetting balance patches seem to be when a patch significantly changes a trait or a weapon skill.  

I vaguely remember something about warrior and a spinning attack upsetting people.

[Hsanrb.1570]

The entire problem with this conversation is that Arena Net probably knows what content the community interacts with most, and which is worth putting resources into. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games where the development team, regardless of its size, will never make every group of players happy. You cannot please the PvE community with story and map metas, the hard mode content PvE, the raiders, small scale PvP, large scale WvW, fashion wars 2, etc. without letting something fall. Balance patches about making builds viable, or weapon styles viable, do not fix the core problems the game has in getting NEW players to play these modes. How much of the community turned off PvP and WvW when Wizards Vault got released... and what could Arena Net do to get these people to turn them on?

Doing weekly/monthly balance changes doesn't do any of that, and the people who still play PvP/WvW are still playing PvP/WvW. Dota 2 gets away with fresh excitement when they completely overhaul their game (like happened last week) but the little patches don't go "I'm not playing Dota 2, but this small X.YZb update is going to make me log in for the first time in 6 months and play again."

2 hours ago, Philalive.8654 said:

Another example is retail World of Warcraft, they completely change up and rework massive parts of every class and specilization every expansion.

Arena Net had the chance with SotO, and their next chance is the next expansion... maybe. If the problem with the game is with the core functionality of the game and not something on the surface than there isn't really much they can do without releasing a brand new game... this Guild Wars 3 proposition. New weapons, versatile skill choices, additional maps and new mechanics are great, but if the fundamental problems with why people don't play these modes aren't addressed... you are just changing one band-aid solution for another.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

It's an interesting point. I think Anet should be looking at ways to add spice and variety which are lower effort than making new maps and stories. Not to replace the new maps and stories I love that stuff and want to keep it. No, I mean alongside them as a way of adding more gameplay and interest for veteran players than can realistically be done with just time intensive new maps and stories.

That said. I think balance patches can only be part of the solution. Probably only a small part too because of the investment GW2 players need to make to their characters equipment in order to adjust to new builds (LoL doesn't have that so much, other than buying new heroes which has been a thing for ages, newly released LoL heroes are usuall overpowered).

I think Anet need other ideas. Rifts were a decent attempt, they added spice to existing zones without (presumably) requiring a huge amount of development effort.  But you need twists on things. Maybe like the fractal instabilities, but more involved? A bit like how games like WWZ have daily and weekly challenges with modifiers which make the game harder, but you also get extra rewards for having completed one of these daily/weekly games.

TBH I haven't given it much thought and don't have any particular ideas, but I think there is a lot of potential for some extra spice in the game if someone can come up with some great ideas.

[Leger.3724]

4 hours ago, Philalive.8654 said:

I'm not entirely sure how this relates to my argument. I obviously understand that PvP, WvW and games like League of Legends have more inherent replayability than a PvE gamemode.

I'm saying nothing about Boss design, the number of abilities or anything about the combat complexity compared to other games.

My argument here is that balance patches are a cost efficient way of providing more content and a better game for a lot of the playerbase. Balance patches are basically the only content that WvW & PvP players ever get, and I'll bet money some PvE players are waiting for their build to be playable, so it makes sense to put some more focus on it, right now if feels like balance is packed into a box, hidden under a blanket, in the basement, under another box and forgotten about, like chirstmas decorations.

I disagree. How many champions are competitively viable in League of Legends? It's a much shorter list than the total number in the game. The League of Legends team doesn't have a very balanced roster. They have a diverse roster where some are competitive and most are not. And if League of Legends brought in a pve game mode (not AI bots trained on players) people would quickly default to the handful of meta champions they see the best players using.

What League of Legends does right in terms of balancing is embracing players creating roles. The playerbase decided on ADC and support bottom lane. Riot didn't go "F that, we're going to nerf all ranged AD into the ground so they have to do something different". They embraced it. Guild Wars 1 embraced metas developed by players.

Guild Wars 2 in development threw this for a loop. There's no fixing Guild Wars 2 because its entire design philosophy and the build from the ground up has been ability spam because they don't want people to have roles. And of course despite this the playerbase has shoehorned in roles for the OP buffs - quickness and alacrity - and primitive healing forms because one design choice Arena Net made was no monks to GW2 so you get these weird pseudo-heal builds instead of the much more complex Monk of Guild Wars 1. The playerbase did this because despite best attempts by Arena Net - there is no good balancing team on the planet for any game. There just isn't. And so players quickly keyed in - alacrity, quickness, healing specs. Exactly what Arena Net said it  was designing to avoid. The one major balance design choice they went with in combat was a failure. They specifically referenced not wanting players waiting in outposts to get monks to run content. We've been in this exact situation for 12 years except it's alacrity/quickness/heals instead of monk.

And what's worse is because these builds are so abstract thanks to the obfuscating and poor design choices by Arena Net... no one wants to touch end game outside of a small minority.

Which is why when developing Guild Wars 3 they should look back at Guild Wars 1, look at League of Legends and other successful games. These games don't have massive ability bars. These games have simple mechanics. These games embraced defined roles or embraced the playerbase setting up defined roles in their beta tests. The roles were easy to understand and pick up but provided depth so you could master them and a good player could differentiate themselves from an average player from a bad one.

A new balance team, changes by the existing balance team. None of it is going to make a difference at this point. We need to ride out GW2, enjoy it, and hope Arena Net has taken good feedback on why the end game pve and pvp has been such a failure and most of it revolves around combat design choices made in 2009-2011 and attempting to prescribe a solution onto the playerbase. And hopefully they realize all of this for GW3. I'm not saying it's easy to design good combat that's approachable but still has depth. I'm not saying Arena Net had bad intentions when developing GW2. But the results speak for themselves with this game.

Edited May 27 by Leger.3724

[Zepiuz.6713]

The playerbase of competitive MOBAs are different from MMORPGs. We mostly just want to explore the openworld and relax and dress up our characters to look good.

 

Balance patches will work for those who care about their characters' stats/damage/condition/healing output. Majority of GW2's playerbase whom are open world enjoyers doesn't care about that.

 

I have been a veteran PvP player from another MMO and I am tired of toxicity from these competitive game modes. How much more toxic are the playerbase of those games you mentioned compared to the majority of the GW2 players?

[Philalive.8654]

3 hours ago, Hsanrb.1570 said:

The entire problem with this conversation is that Arena Net probably knows what content the community interacts with most, and which is worth putting resources into. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games where the development team, regardless of its size, will never make every group of players happy. You cannot please the PvE community with story and map metas, the hard mode content PvE, the raiders, small scale PvP, large scale WvW, fashion wars 2, etc. without letting something fall. Balance patches about making builds viable, or weapon styles viable, do not fix the core problems the game has in getting NEW players to play these modes. How much of the community turned off PvP and WvW when Wizards Vault got released... and what could Arena Net do to get these people to turn them on?

Doing weekly/monthly balance changes doesn't do any of that, and the people who still play PvP/WvW are still playing PvP/WvW. Dota 2 gets away with fresh excitement when they completely overhaul their game (like happened last week) but the little patches don't go "I'm not playing Dota 2, but this small X.YZb update is going to make me log in for the first time in 6 months and play again."

Arena Net had the chance with SotO, and their next chance is the next expansion... maybe. If the problem with the game is with the core functionality of the game and not something on the surface than there isn't really much they can do without releasing a brand new game... this Guild Wars 3 proposition. New weapons, versatile skill choices, additional maps and new mechanics are great, but if the fundamental problems with why people don't play these modes aren't addressed... you are just changing one band-aid solution for another.

"The entire problem with this conversation is that Arena Net probably knows what content the community interacts with most, and which is worth putting resources into. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games where the development team, regardless of its size, will never make every group of players happy. You cannot please the PvE community with story and map metas, the hard mode content PvE, the raiders, small scale PvP, large scale WvW, fashion wars 2, etc. without letting something fall."

I dislike your argument that "Arenanet knows best" Why? How? Do you feel like there's been historical evidence of that? It's a simple appeal to authority without substantiation and as I've outlined in my original post I think I've made an argument for something that they've underinvested into, not because it's the most important thing in the universe but because it's theoretically a very small investment. Obviously you're not going to keep everyone happy with everything in every gamemode but I don't think that's an argument relating to or against what I'm suggesting here, I agree that people will probably want more content regardless.

 

"Balance patches about making builds viable, or weapon styles viable, do not fix the core problems the game has in getting NEW players to play these modes. How much of the community turned off PvP and WvW when Wizards Vault got released... and what could Arena Net do to get these people to turn them on?"

I again I feel like you're talking about something beyond the scope of my argument for more consistent balance patches. I don't think I've made the argument that more frequent balance patches would incentivize new players to start playing PvP or WvW. Rather specifically I made the argument that it would be helpful for player retention.

 

"Doing weekly/monthly balance changes doesn't do any of that"

Again, I'm not sure if you're just going for a strawman here but when did I say it would change those things?

 

"and the people who still play PvP/WvW are still playing PvP/WvW."

I think it's been and still is pretty obvious that those 2 gamemodes are have shrunk and probably are still shrinking. I obviously can't say it's categorically false since neither of us have the data on that, anecdotally at least I've felt it's not true. I can think of lots of friends and players in general that have quit PvP/WvW and aren't "Still playing PvP/WvW."

 

"Dota 2 gets away with fresh excitement when they completely overhaul their game (like happened last week) but the little patches don't go "I'm not playing Dota 2, but this small X.YZb update is going to make me log in for the first time in 6 months and play again.""

I'm just pointing out again that you're arguing against something you've imagined up and not what I've made arguments for and about.

 

You mention "fix the core problems the game has in getting NEW players to play these modes." referring to the "core problems" as issues getting new players into PvP and WvW but then later add "If the problem with the game is with the core functionality of the game" referring to something else undefined? I don't think the game is inherently flawed and unfixable, and if you do then I can understand why you don't think there are any good solutions since you're referring to a mysterious "core functionality".

 

My point is only that I believe it's unhealthy for the game to have such a small focus on balance, and I think investing (very slightly) more resources towards it would not only be (basically) free in the grand scheme of things but also worth way more than the actual investment would cost Arenanet.

[Philalive.8654]

3 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

It's an interesting point. I think Anet should be looking at ways to add spice and variety which are lower effort than making new maps and stories. Not to replace the new maps and stories I love that stuff and want to keep it. No, I mean alongside them as a way of adding more gameplay and interest for veteran players than can realistically be done with just time intensive new maps and stories.

That said. I think balance patches can only be part of the solution. Probably only a small part too because of the investment GW2 players need to make to their characters equipment in order to adjust to new builds (LoL doesn't have that so much, other than buying new heroes which has been a thing for ages, newly released LoL heroes are usuall overpowered).

I think Anet need other ideas. Rifts were a decent attempt, they added spice to existing zones without (presumably) requiring a huge amount of development effort.  But you need twists on things. Maybe like the fractal instabilities, but more involved? A bit like how games like WWZ have daily and weekly challenges with modifiers which make the game harder, but you also get extra rewards for having completed one of these daily/weekly games.

TBH I haven't given it much thought and don't have any particular ideas, but I think there is a lot of potential for some extra spice in the game if someone can come up with some great ideas.

I absolutely agree with what you're saying here, and yeah balance patches probably isn't the end all be all for the entire game in all modes everywhere. It's especially true if we're talking about the PvE side of things. I do think it should be a consideration though, at least in my mind it just seems like the cheapest possible update that still excites a lot of players, especially in the PvP and WvW community.

[Philalive.8654]

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

I disagree. How many champions are competitively viable in League of Legends? It's a much shorter list than the total number in the game. The League of Legends team doesn't have a very balanced roster. They have a diverse roster where some are competitive and most are not. And if League of Legends brought in a pve game mode (not AI bots trained on players) people would quickly default to the handful of meta champions they see the best players using.

What League of Legends does right in terms of balancing is embracing players creating roles. The playerbase decided on ADC and support bottom lane. Riot didn't go "F that, we're going to nerf all ranged AD into the ground so they have to do something different". They embraced it. Guild Wars 1 embraced metas developed by players.

Guild Wars 2 in development threw this for a loop. There's no fixing Guild Wars 2 because its entire design philosophy and the build from the ground up has been ability spam because they don't want people to have roles. And of course despite this the playerbase has shoehorned in roles for the OP buffs - quickness and alacrity - and primitive healing forms because one design choice Arena Net made was no monks to GW2 so you get these weird pseudo-heal builds instead of the much more complex Monk of Guild Wars 1. The playerbase did this because despite best attempts by Arena Net - there is no good balancing team on the planet for any game. There just isn't. And so players quickly keyed in - alacrity, quickness, healing specs. Exactly what Arena Net said it  was designing to avoid. The one major balance design choice they went with in combat was a failure. They specifically referenced not wanting players waiting in outposts to get monks to run content. We've been in this exact situation for 12 years except it's alacrity/quickness/heals instead of monk.

And what's worse is because these builds are so abstract thanks to the obfuscating and poor design choices by Arena Net... no one wants to touch end game outside of a small minority.

Which is why when developing Guild Wars 3 they should look back at Guild Wars 1, look at League of Legends and other successful games. These games don't have massive ability bars. These games have simple mechanics. These games embraced defined roles or embraced the playerbase setting up defined roles in their beta tests. The roles were easy to understand and pick up but provided depth so you could master them and a good player could differentiate themselves from an average player from a bad one.

A new balance team, changes by the existing balance team. None of it is going to make a difference at this point. We need to ride out GW2, enjoy it, and hope Arena Net has taken good feedback on why the end game pve and pvp has been such a failure and most of it revolves around combat design choices made in 2009-2011 and attempting to prescribe a solution onto the playerbase. And hopefully they realize all of this for GW3. I'm not saying it's easy to design good combat that's approachable but still has depth. I'm not saying Arena Net had bad intentions when developing GW2. But the results speak for themselves with this game.

"How many champions are competitively viable in League of Legends? It's a much shorter list than the total number in the game."

According to this about 87 out of the 168 total champions were picked and/or banned in the last worlds tournament (the biggest and most competetive world-wide tournament league has).

 

"The League of Legends team doesn't have a very balanced roster. They have a diverse roster where some are competitive and most are not."

I compeletely agree, if you read my post you can see that I say this exactly and I even explain why!

 

"And if League of Legends brought in a pve game mode (not AI bots trained on players) people would quickly default to the handful of meta champions they see the best players using. "

More than usual, or compared to PvP modes? Why? Do you have an example or comparison to back that up? I feel like people are even more incentivized to play the "handful of meta champions they see the best players using" when it's a competetive PvP game. The more casual content is the less people are going to care about how optimized their build/class is, I'd love to hear your arguments against that because I feel like it's pretty universally true for, almost, all games.

There ain't no one out here complaining that they can't play Power Virtuoso in open-world metas because it's not a meta dps build at the moment.

 

"What League of Legends does right in terms of balancing is embracing players creating roles. The playerbase decided on ADC and support bottom lane. Riot didn't go "F that, we're going to nerf all ranged AD into the ground so they have to do something different". They embraced it."

It's funny you should use this as your specific example considering it's just categorically false. Riot has, at least 2 times tried to forcefully (and successfully) killed the ranged AD in the ADC role. The two example I can think of at the top of my head are the meta when we had Rekkles running around on Garen with a Yuumi support against a Mage in the botlane without a single ranged AD champion in sight. The other example is when they reworked ADC items and buffed bot mages which ended up in half a season of pretty much Mages only being viable in the role (Seraphine, Ziggs, etc).

 

As for your next points, I'm not even sure how to engage with your arguments honestly. You're saying the game is so fundamentally flawed it's completely beyond saving at this point so we should do nothing to improve anything and just give up? I just don't see how that's productive or helpful in this context. I do understand that you're very disappointed with the design descisions made in Guild Wars 2 but not all of us hate the game. I happen to think that we actually have a good base to stand on and all I'm doing now is advocating for it to the as good as it can be.

[Philalive.8654]

19 minutes ago, Zeperio.4853 said:

The playerbase of competitive MOBAs are different from MMORPGs. We mostly just want to explore the openworld and relax and dress up our characters to look good.

 

Balance patches will work for those who care about their characters' stats/damage/condition/healing output. Majority of GW2's playerbase whom are open world enjoyers doesn't care about that.

 

I have been a veteran PvP player from another MMO and I am tired of toxicity from these competitive game modes. How much more toxic are the playerbase of those games you mentioned compared to the majority of the GW2 players?

I agree with the first 2 points you have here. It probably won't do much for the very casual story players, unless they also like to mess around with traits and/or builds. I personally quite like open-world buildcrafting but to each their own.

As to the last point I'm slightly confused, are you saying that balance patches in games make them more toxic? Or just that other games are more toxic compared to Guild Wars, and if so how does that relate to balance patches?

[Zepiuz.6713]

7 minutes ago, Philalive.8654 said:

I agree with the first 2 points you have here. It probably won't do much for the very casual story players, unless they also like to mess around with traits and/or builds. I personally quite like open-world buildcrafting but to each their own.

As to the last point I'm slightly confused, are you saying that balance patches in games make them more toxic? Or just that other games are more toxic compared to Guild Wars, and if so how does that relate to balance patches?

My last point has nothing to do with balance patches causing toxicity in game. Competitive game modes attracts competitive people and one of competition's unfortunate after effect is toxicity. Even you cannot dispute that.

Nobody is out here to get you. Accept that GW2 is mostly composed of non competitive and probably never will be interested in competitive game modes playerbase.

Edited May 27 by Zeperio.4853

[Philalive.8654]

21 minutes ago, Zeperio.4853 said:

My last point has nothing to do with balance patches causing toxicity in game. Competitive game modes attracts competitive people and one of competition's unfortunate after effect is toxicity. Even you cannot dispute that.

Nobody is out here to get you. Accept that GW2 is mostly composed of non competitive and probably never will be interested in competitive game modes playerbase.

"Competitive game modes attracts competitive people and one of competition's unfortunate after effect is toxicity. Even you cannot dispute that. "

I didn't know that I had, actually, I'm pretty certain that I never disputed that, but alright?

 

"Nobody is out here to get you."

Right, thanks?

 

"Accept that GW2 is mostly composed of non competitive and probably never will be interested in competitive game modes playerbase."

Again I'm so confused, I've never disputed the fact that the majority of the Guild Wars 2 playerbase is very casual and uninterested in competitive gamemodes, have I?

 

Are we still talking about the frequency and size of balance patches in Guild Wars 2?

[Cyninja.2954]

There are so many issues not accounted for only to try to make a weak comparison. Let's roll some of them off:

1. as mentioned by others: the games you mention are PVP games at heart. The majority of content there happens due to the interaction with other players. Balance patches in those games merely change the tools the other player uses, thus shaking up the encounter on a design level, but the other player is still the one creating the content with this tool in hand.

This is comparable to WvW in this game, a mode which has run for 12 years by now with nearly no content patches.

2. Both LoL and DotA players face a far smaller issue in changing character, build, etc. It's a far different beast in a MMORPG, which is also why most/all MMORPGs make for poor PvP games.Also mentioned and experienced by some players in other MMORPGs too, namely WoW was mentioned. Having your class fall completely off the table has a vastly different effect here than it does in LoL or DotA (where most often players stick to a role, not class too).

3. Balance for LoL and DotA is far far far easier than for GW2. There are far less skills to balance, items to balance, interactions to balance. This makes it far easier to shuffle or adjust things. There are also far better ways to discourage play of "overpowered" champions in both games, by mere design of their competitive tournaments (characters being banned, denied by the other team, etc.)

Sorry but your comparison falls very flat. You are essentially talking about content while attributing this to balance patches and cycles not realizing that the main difference you should be looking at is actual content development, which is vastly different between PvE and PvP. Thus balance patches will have a very different impact on either type of game.

TL;DR:

A balance change in LoL to a champion does not change the content. It changes how a player will play that champion, making the interaction with that player change (this player can be someone else or ones self, thus changing the interaction for the enemy player). That still leaves the PLAYER as the main factor in content development.

Edited May 27 by Cyninja.2954

[Philalive.8654]

56 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

There are so many issues not accounted for only to try to make a weak comparison. Let's roll some of them off:

1. as mentioned by others: the games you mention are PVP games at heart. The majority of content there happens due to the interaction with other players. Balance patches in those games merely change the tools the other player uses, thus shaking up the encounter on a design level, but the other player is still the one creating the content with this tool in hand.

This is comparable to WvW in this game, a mode which has run for 12 years by now with nearly no content patches.

2. Both LoL and DotA players face a far smaller issue in changing character, build, etc. It's a far different beast in a MMORPG, which is also why most/all MMORPGs make for poor PvP games.Also mentioned and experienced by some players in other MMORPGs too, namely WoW was mentioned. Having your class fall completely off the table has a vastly different effect here than it does in LoL or DotA (where most often players stick to a role, not class too).

3. Balance for LoL and DotA is far far far easier than for GW2. There are far less skills to balance, items to balance, interactions to balance. This makes it far easier to shuffle or adjust things. There are also far better ways to discourage play of "overpowered" champions in both games, by mere design of their competitive tournaments (characters being banned, denied by the other team, etc.)

Sorry but your comparison falls very flat. You are essentially talking about content while attributing this to balance patches and cycles not realizing that the main difference you should be looking at is actual content development, which is vastly different between PvE and PvP. Thus balance patches will have a very different impact on either type of game.

TL;DR:

A balance change in LoL to a champion does not change the content. It changes how a player will play that champion, making the interaction with that player change (this player can be someone else or ones self, thus changing the interaction for the enemy player). That still leaves the PLAYER as the main factor in content development.

I appreicate your reply! Well made points and with arguments and everything! So,

1. The games I compared to in my original post are indeed PvP games. I don't think it's fair to just ignore the fact that 2/3 gamemodes in Guild Wars 2 are also PvP though (even if they're comparatively smaller). As you've correctly pointed out at the end of your point here, it is indeed comparable to WvW (and PvP).

I completely agree with: "Balance patches in those games merely change the tools the other player uses, thus shaking up the encounter on a design level, but the other player is still the one creating the content with this tool in hand." which is a great argument for why we should also have more balance in WvW and PvP, like you said it is comparable.

As for PvE I concede that the 2 mobas I chose to compare with isn't a great 1 to 1 comparison which is why I brought up Retail WoW and Season of Discovery as well (in response to other comments), they're much better comparisons to make when you're looking at the PvE side of things. The same argument I made from the comparsion with the mobas I can make with WoW and SoD.

 

2. I agree that it's much easier to change build/character in a MOBA and the comparison does indeed fall flat when considering the difficulty in changing your playstyle. It does feel worse when your main class in an MMO falls off compared to your favorite character in a MOBA. But how does it logically follow after that, that the solution is less balance?

Anyway, let's say, for argument's sake that it does logically follow that less balance is the solution to players not feeling like their class gets worse with patches, couldn't I make the same argument you're making comparing the difficulty changing builds/character with Guild Wars 2 compared to MOBAs, in the same direction with things like WoW and SoD? They're even harder to reroll in than Guild Wars 2 and they have way more frequent balance and "shake-ups" but still manage to make it work? All of their competitive gamemodes both in PvE and PvP are way more popular and seem to have a lot more staying power than our current system of very rare balance, fewer and even smaller "shake-ups".

 

3. League and Dota may be easier to balance compared to Guild Wars 2, does that mean we should focus less on balance then? Not more?

Same thing with being able to deny overly powerful builds and playstyles, doesn't that just mean that they have more lee-way to be less focused on balance, since the playerbase can auto-balance to some degree while we're completely reliant on the developers to "do the bans for us"?

 

"Sorry but your comparison falls very flat. You are essentially talking about content while attributing this to balance patches and cycles not realizing that the main difference you should be looking at is actual content development, which is vastly different between PvE and PvP. Thus balance patches will have a very different impact on either type of game."

I completely disagree with you here. The comparison I made is only useful as far as it seems to work for other games, why not for this one too? Obviously no other game is going to be a 1 to 1 comparsion but I don't think that invalidates the argument that we should have a stronger focus on balance.

I'm not saying that balance should, can or will replace "real" content like new stories, new maps, new raids, new fractals, and so on for PvE. I'm saying that it's a cost effective way of keeping old content fresh for PvE and it is, as you've said yourself: "WvW in this game, a mode which has run for 12 years by now with nearly no content patches." basically the only content that WvW (and PvP) gets.

So while I agree that you can't say balance patches will replace content in PvE, I don't think anything you've brought up speaks for the current system of balance we have right now being superior to what I'm suggesting, in fact your post mostly just confirms that we indeed should have more MOBA-like balance in WvW and PvP.

 

TL;DR:

A balance change in LoL (WvW/PvP) to a champion (class) does not change the content. It changes how a player will play that champion (class), making the interaction with that player change (this player can be someone else or ones self, thus changing the interaction for the enemy player). That still leaves the PLAYER as the main factor in content development.

 

I'll end with a question: Is there a good reason we're deciding to not make changes to clear underperformers, like for example Alacrity Mirage in PvE? It's clearly not in a good spot, what are we waiting for? Is there an argument you can make for why a change to that build needs to take 6+ months?

Edited May 27 by Philalive.8654

[Zok.4956]

7 hours ago, Philalive.8654 said:

WvW and PvP does need some love and I understand completely that Arenanet can't devote big resources to these gamemodes but I think I speak for most of the dedicated WvW community when I say that: "World Restructuring is nice but I'd rather have a balance patch focused on WvW. " and it'd probably be 100x cheaper for Arenanet too.

First: sPvP in GW2 has been practically dead for many years because the very lively and large eSports and PvP community left GW2 because Anet failed to balance the classes reasonably well.

Second: History shows that Anet doesn't do balancing well. Why do you think that Anet suddenly manages to balance the classes well?

Third: I don't think you speak for "most of the dedicated WvW community".  Claiming that you speak for others is usually an attempt to make your own opinion seem more important. Because the arguments do not seem strong or good enough on their own.

 

[Philalive.8654]

6 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

First: sPvP in GW2 has been practically dead for many years because the very lively and large eSports and PvP community left GW2 because Anet failed to balance the classes reasonably well.

Second: History shows that Anet doesn't do balancing well. Why do you think that Anet suddenly manages to balance the classes well?

Third: I don't think you speak for "most of the dedicated WvW community".  Claiming that you speak for others is usually an attempt to make your own opinion seem more important. Because the arguments do not seem strong or good enough on their own.

 

1. So, PvP is dead? Solution is to... what?

2. I agree that Anet haven't done balancing well historically, but again, the solution to that is... what? Less balance? Don't touch anything again? Not to try and fix it?

3. I will concede that it's a cheap statement to make. But attacking that statement and then proceeding to attack my arguments with "[they] do not seem strong or good enough on their own." without any sort of counter argument or criticism of the arguments themselves, does seem hypocritical to me. So I'll concede that it was a cheap statement but at least come with your own counter arguments if you want to disagree as well.

Edited May 27 by Philalive.8654

[Zepiuz.6713]

You are so aggressive man, goes to show that you really love those competitive toxic games that you mentioned. You cannot change anybody's mind if all your replies are based on your aggressive emotions. Why not just enjoy playing those and accept GW2 as it is. They lasted this long without doing the things you suggested.

[Philalive.8654]

2 minutes ago, Zeperio.4853 said:

You are so aggressive man, goes to show that you really love those competitive toxic games that you mentioned. You cannot change anybody's mind if all your replies are based on your aggressive emotions. Why not just enjoy playing those and accept GW2 as it is. They lasted this long without doing the things you suggested.

I will apologize for my combativeness, you're right that I come across as aggressive.

It feels like people have lots of things to say about my comparisons, my arguments and suggestions but no one is actually offering an alternative solution or even arguing against more balance. It doesn't seem like anyone is giving me reasons for why we shouldn't have more consistent/more focus on balance. It seems to not really matter much if they do balance or not which is fair enough, it doesn't have to be for everyone, but that doesn't mean that it's a bad idea itself.

The point of your first post seems to be that it doesn't really matter much, since the majority of the playerbase is more interested in exploring the open world, doing the story and things like Fashion Wars (correct me if I'm wrong, I don't mean to misrepresent what your point was). And I completely agree that those things are very important for the game and nothing I'm suggesting is in opposition of that. But is it that hard a pill to swallow that it would also be beneficial to make the players in competitive modes happy with a small investment in time to adjust some numbers?

My title is referring to a playerbase, as in a specific subset of players. I'm not saying it's the biggest issue for all of Guild Wars 2 or that it should take priority over other things that Anet needs to work on, I just feel like it's a cheap and easy start to make (at least) the WvW and PvP community happier. I'm sure there are also a lot of casual open world players that would love to see a build that they love see the light of day?

I hope this response doesn't come off as quite as aggressive, it really isn't my intention and if you have reasons for why it'd be a bad idea to invest more into balance I'd love to hear them.

[Nash.2681]

So tl;dr: you want more frequent balancing for PvP and WvW and the thread title is completely missleading?