Does Anet Know How to Properly Balance a Metagame?

This is actually part of the problem for Anet... because they can change skills pretty much at will, they are not as careful with creating and modifying skills as they could/should be. Wizards can only ban cards once they're printed, so they have to be very careful when designing cards in the first place. I think that's one of the reasons why we see skill balances month after month.

It's the same reason pretty much all computer games these days come out awfully bugged -- the makers of the games know they can patch later, so they aren't as careful before releasing their product.

Yes I over evaluated a bit with the 90% thing but I think the basic point is there. Even if something is too exhaustive in the game an eventual build will spring up usually by creative players.

However I don't believe Nerfing an entire line of skills in an attribute is the answer (via nerfs to communing increasing the casting time of Mesmer skills while increasing the cost the energy management skills with little energy payback for the Inspiration line of skills)

It was not one or two skills they nerfed in Communing it was the whole line up of communing to virtual uselessness. One of the reasons I just don’t see many Spawning, Communing Rits any more. Almost all Ritualist have gone Barrage Channeling weapons and restoration healers. Spawning that was once the identifying mark of the Ritualist has become a virtually extinct animal.

MTG is a card game? How the hell was I meant to be able to understand that reference!!! *roles eyes*

But see, now it makes sense to me!! No use of character names, or places. No mention of "eras" and stuff. Now I can comment...

...I dont understand.

Is not having unbeatable builds a bad thing? Surely if they found a build that was unbeatable, everyone of that profession would use it. Then everyone would winge to have it nerfed.

Anet will never make the game 100% balanced, because there are 1000s of skills and 1000000s of combinations. Its unfeasable that Anet could possibly predict every skill combination ingame and adjust every skills to make it fair.

Their doing the best they can.

But not nearly 1000 of those skills see play. Only around 100-200 skills total are ever in competitive rotation.

That's because there are only about 100-200 skills worth even looking at, or that will fit any situation in GVG. Some things that will work for a beast master party, say like call of protection or run as one, will not see use in GVG, simply for the fact that no one will run a build like that. Some skills will only benefit PVE and won't really work in PVP. Most PVE farming builds that involve a warrior use things like endure pain, defy pain, cyclone axe, etc. simply because you will get the AI to crowd around you. In a PVP situation, everything isn't balling up around you trying to all concentrate on you, or as soon as defy/endure pain goes up, the target will instantly be switched off of you and onto someone else.

The metagame wont be balanced until Anet institutes either Sealed Deck play for all serious forms of PvP or limits the amount of duplicated professions allowed in a team (for example, no more than 3 of the same profession, as almost every single imbalance since the start of GW was based on using multiple of the same profession).

This is exactly the reason why a thousand skills exist. For enough diversity that you'll be able to handle any situation you come across, you need a large skill library. However, in GvG, these scenarios are inherently limited, therefore you will never need to even come close to using the full library when only a few efficient skills do the job and mesh well together.

Sealed deck would be a great format for competitive play.

Hell, I'd really like to see a 6v6 format, like RA or TA with sealed deck.

However, having a profession limit is a little extreme; we're going under the assumption that every build can be beaten. Teams like Bloodspike are damn tough to beat, but that only sweetens the victory.

To put it easy from my perspective people who made this game and people who balance it are humans and humans do make mistakes but they also learns from their mistakes and i think a-net does a good job ,why? Well if u are still playing the game well they did a good job ,what a company can not do is acomplish the wishes of everyone of its customers
and there wil always be pros and cons for every update they make.

GW has slowly evolved towards absolute balance:
- all skills take the same time to cast
- all skills heal/damage by the same amount
- all skills have the same chnace of applying damage
(except of course for the 90% of all skills that are just weaker variants of the reference ones)

IMO they should probably jump straight to that and make it into rock-paper-scissors, and be done with it. That would cover PvP nicely. As for PvE, it's not like anyone cares about balance.

well i have a couple solutions in mind (granted they have probably already been posted, im currently at work and dont have overly much time to browse all comments so dont mind the toe stepping) anyrate 1 very drastic but overall could probably work solution is take out a lot of the nerfs on skills and classes, as stated like the paragon and rits. Give para's back their chants n whatnot and the rits back their spirits. Let mesmers still be a skill reliant class but my god cut them some slack. let ele's do all sorts of uber damage as theyre gonna do no matter how hard a-net takes the nerf-bat to their faces. Let necros get their normal soul reaping back just dont have it trigger off of spirits or even reduce the area that necros gain their soul reaping. Basically what im tryin to say is let every class have their own overpowered-ness and basically delete the name "metagame" from the dictionary. Let mesmers have an aoe backfire or somethin....no more SF way or make dust traps have a larger trigger area no more iway. Not exactly saying its the cure-all end-all solution but the metagame is essentially defined as the currently most powered skills and the best support skills to make a team of uber overpoweredness. Make everything overpowered and now there will be 20 different popular meta builds which basically keeps any one build from being the gimmick fame farming cookie cutter of the month. Of course by doing this your basically turning halls into a slaughterfest and really the only way to compensate for this would increase armor lvl's or HP lvl's....which aint gonna happen...so idea 1 would be fun but yeah prolly not. idea 2 is allow 2-3 month periods between these nerf fests and allow exceptions for PvP weekends or whatever. Also maybe even a week by week skill balance that kinda puts favor into certain classes or skills (which is basically a more hectic version of what we got now except we're not allowing a month or so for the build to be tweaked to broken-ness) oooor....maybe no nerfs at all....or at the very least minimal ones. either rate they do need to give these skill balances some time to ferment and let the anti meta develop...then the anti-anti meta...and so on and so forth till eventually your in a basically no longer running a meta or gimmick build your just running a build that once countered a build that countered a build and whatnot.

Just thought I'd point out how wrong this is.

Players ARE the experts in all aspects of the game. As can be seen with the outcry over Soul Reaping, economy nerfs, etc.

If the devs had the time to be the experts at the game, then they would not have the time to actually be programming EoTN or 2, or making all these changes constantly. That's why, ostensibly, the devs ask for player input, then proceed to ignore it, perhaps they do think they know better?

Which is foolish. The amount of player hours put into playing the game, both PvE and PvP, and seeing how skills interact far outstrips anything the dev team could possibly hope to even come close to.

There's no way 1000 skills will ever see equal representation in the game, how could it when the amount of skills available to any player is 8 at one time? As has been said by many, the game will cease to be fun when ALL skills are equal in utility and playability, then there's no variety.

There's a reason people don't use Flare in most builds, its a starter skill that is obsolete. There are MANY skills that are used by players to "cut their teeth" on the game system in both PvE and PvP. But to try and make all skills equally attractive to all levels of play is not only stupid in concept, its a pipe dream due to the fact that there are many different players, with vastly different playstyles.

The best form of balance, would be to enlist a group of "elite" players that's 10 to 20 times larger than the dev team. And watch how they play and what skills they use, similar to a Nielsen ratings group. You wouldn't even have to let the players know they were being watched, it could be cycled and random groups. But the WORST form of balance is to take a select few people's ideas (overworked devs who can only clock in a couple hours of playtime a week, or overly vocal players who claim to represent or know the masses) and implement them with no burn-in period, and then telling the whole community that "its good for you, like it or leave it."

ANet is a company who vested interest is in pleasing its customers, not a parent who knows what's best. A very important distinction.

Its not so much that people dont care about balance in PvE. Its just it doesnt really require a specialised build to complete PvE. Any old bulid and some skill is able to complete the PvE side.

This means balance isnt really needed, but it doesnt mean PvE shouldnt be considered when balancing skills.

You can nerf a spell to benefit PvP, and it has a knock on effect on a players build in PvE.

You might have a great FOW, UW or DOA build that works amazing. A few nerfs later and its less effective or completely useless.

Yes you can just adjust, but PvE has a differnt mentality in my view. PvE players like to settle into one build and enjoy playing with one particular build.

We dont need to change all the time like PvP'ers and we like it that way. We only change if it benefits a mission.

If we're forced to change due to nerfs, its frustrating.

I wouldnt personally call that balancing a game out. Not when PvP (from my opinion) get more priority over nerfs to PvE.

Im not suggesting skills never get nerfed to benefit PvE, which dont effect PvP - but nerfs for PvP are more frequent.

Yeah well if they are so concerned about balance, then why do they always forget that balance can be achieved by two means? So, instead of lowering, why not raise? I'll bet that if they buffed Mesmers, Paragons, and Assassins, then those classes would go through a renaissance of revival, be positively received, and in general help the game. I have seen suggestions before about how they can be buffed without causing problems in PvP in other threads.

I'll admit, buffing is not as easy as nerfing. But it is a heck of a lot more fun.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

This I can see where the PVE community is comming from. Yes it sucks to have a good build that you enjoy playing. PVP players have builds they love playing that are good, effective builds, just like the PVE Farming builds are at what they do. We get hit by the nerfbat and are forced to change our builds just as often as you guys are. Some of the best builds in GW PVP history have been destroyed by rediculous nerfs.
There are a lot of PVP players that feel the same way. They will just find one thing and ride it out until its beaten into oblivion. This is part of the reason the nerfs/buffs happen. This is where the new FOTM build comes from are these players that will look for whatever will give them the most advantage with having to do the least amount of work or effort and allow even bad blayers to think they are remotely good. These are basically the "Wammo's" of PVP. Thus these are the people that are the first to bitch about their build getting nerfed and how it ruined PVP for them and they are quitting GW and we should all feel sorry for them....
PVP nerfs will always be more frequent than PVE nerfs, strictly due to balance in PVP being more important. As you posted earlier, PVE doesn't really need balance to thrive and when the origional design and concept of guildwars came out, the game wasnt ment to be so centered towards PVE. Thus the lack of major things to do in PVE after you have finished the game. And yes there have been several nerfs in GW history that have been inspired from PVE. The prot bond nerf is one of the biggest. also a lot of the smiting nerfs pre air of enchant were aimed towards stopping gold farmers.

Guild Wars is obviously broken and it will take ANET a LONG TIME to fix/update all the issues that is going on right now. (of course, no game is perfect)

Hence, that is where GuildWars 2 comes in. Instead of investing all of their time and effort to fix the mistakes they made, they plan to take their experience and mistakes to develop the ultimate guildwars: Guild Wars 2.


However, I wonder if the issues for Guild Wars 1 will ever be fixed? Will it be fixed before Guild Wars 2 is released? What if Guild Wars 2 is more broken than Guild Wars 1?

I never really had doubts in Anet, but the issue with HA and imbalance skills + SLOWWWW turnaround time to fix these issues, has created a high level of doubt for me.

From mi point of view skills are being nerfed more because of pvp and not pve.A skil that is to overwpowered in pvp might not be so powerful in pve ,so my idea to counter this would be to make 2 diferent versions of the skill (it can even have another colour description so the player knows the skill has another version of it in pve or pvp).An example of this can be searing flames and sand storm which both got nerfed imo because of them being to powerful and overused in pvp,but they warent so powerful in pve i mean even now searing flames does what 30-40 dmg to dredge in urgoz warren.
So that was my idea to counter some of the skil nerfing but who knows it might not even work or be suported by the game the thing is i dont see many skills being nerfed because they are to powerful in pve or even ab(if oposing teams has an minion master or more and manages to build up an army well they are the winners,its all in the numbers)

When GW was released, players were supposed to play PvE for unlocks and the very first design for the game were for a PvE game. Repeating the myth, that PvE is just an afterthought doesn't make it true.

GW is a PvE+PvP hybrid game!

Power creep much?

I dunno bro, when was the last time you kicked a deity's caboose?

I would think that power creep would be a conveyor belt of sorts as you grow in experience, affecting the player alone. A "buff" would not be that, since the monsters use the same skills, they would be made commensurately more powerful as well. I mean, we're so overpowered and all, what with the level 28's and half skill activation times.

Yeah, I stick by my statement. Buff > Nerf.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce