When was pvp in a good state?

[Arheundel.6451]

3 minutes ago, Swagg.9236 said:

GW2's PvP was never truly stellar.  From launch to HoT, it was clearly evident that the game had too few unique mechanics going for it, so the result of "PvP development" was effectively just a cat-and-mouse game between random damage increases and competing stall mechanic increases.  Everything got massive damage boosts, and when people complained that everybody was getting one-shot, attacks started getting evasion/invuln periods; basically the game started to play itself.

 

This sort of syndrome never healed, and HoT was sort of the final straw for any hope in a PvP meta defined by legitimate, fair, risk-reward interactions.  As it stands now, PvP is hardly any different than PvE:  it's very rotation-heavy an defined by a strict meta; builds mostly are allowed to do their best combos without interruption, and people just sort of play patty-cake in the background when all of their best skills are on cooldown.  To an extent, GW2 had always been like this, but it's consistently trended further and further down this hole as the years passed.  One could say that, despite its praise for the game's "innovating movement system" and "fluidity of play," the GW2 playerbase never wanted anything but a game that just played itself with minimal effort.

You either make a game for the dedicated few who are ready to put in the work to see rewards or...you make a game in line with the current social trends...best reward=now for no effort. GW2 playerbase is all about winning not the actual competition or challenge similar to other MMOs....and a company must do what needs to be done in order to survive 

[Swagg.9236]

1 minute ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

You either make a game for the dedicated few who are ready to put in the work to see rewards or...you make a game in line with the current social trends...best reward=now for no effort. GW2 playerbase is all about winning not the actual competition or challenge similar to other MMOs....and a company must do what needs to be done in order to survive 

Or you make a game and then let the players customize it.  Maybe one doesn't have to be as generous as Valve with TF2 or something, but it's not like the tools that Anet uses to design its maps (i.e. the tools used to generate, place, rotate and shape objects) aren't literally 1:1 what people got in Wildstar for making houses.  Community contributions are the only consistent lifeblood for video games nowadays.  Since everything is so half-baked half of the time (100% of the time in GW2), the only time that anybody ever sees anything cool come from most things is often when somebody makes it independent from a developer.  I guarantee you that if GW2 opened its source tools to its playerbase, you'd end up with a dozen, community-accepted maps and new game-modes within three months.  It's way too late for that now.

[UN Owen.2794]

core for almost half a year right until the june patch that powercreeped eveyrthing with the trait system revamp.

hot season 3-4

hot season 7 before core guard buff

pof was always horrible but at least it was relatively fun when everything was broken around year after release

Edited June 30, 2021 by UN Owen.2794