Skill Balancing

However bad WotC may be at balancing (which I don't neccessarily agree with since they've been around for over 15 years), they make Anet look like a pile of garbage when it comes to balance.

there will always be people that claim that there isn't anything balanced. magic, gw, or that weight scale in your bathroom when you get on it to check your weight once a year.

But i think it's hard to ignore the long history, popularity and money that it makes compared to GW. How many national and international tournaments are there offering prizes totaling multiple million dollars worth every year. I remember my youger brother won at a national MotG tournament financial support that paid for a year of college at a public 4 year university. (he qualified for this national tournament via a region tournament and got an all expenses paid trip to DC) GW certainly can't afford it. Why do you think they don't fly people out for the championships like they did in Taipei anymore?

prize value and all expense paid trips aside, it's important to remember GW took many risks, some of them paid off well, some didn't. when people found out that you could only use 8 skills at a time, especially people from UO, EQ, WoW, FFXI they were outraged. but that restriction was what made GW:P such a successful game. Now, however, they've effectively negated/reduced that success by release more and more powerful skills each chapter.

like i said earlier in this thread the marketing strategy made the sales of GW:P such a successful release, but it turned out to be not so viable in the long run, because the energy barrier for new players to enter was too high, financially (real $s) as well as in game learning curve. I've many friends that i've tried to get to play GW (at the time they were FFXI fanatics). they said they saw excellent reviews for it, they heard ch2 was coming out and wanted to see how it would do. Then after finding out it would be difficult to be competitive without buying 2 games, they told me they'd need to save up a bit. But even then it's hard to justify spending 100$ on a game when you have rent and bills to pay. When NF came it, it was over, no question.

Magic in it's long life has had many people quit it, grow out of it, or otherwise retire from it. so what keeps it alive? it's friendly to new players. they don't force new players to go purchase the games (cards) from 1993 to be at a competitive level. This also allows MotG to try new things and keep the game fresh, for example removing counterspells from blue.

whether it's by retiring old skills or not, what GW needs is to lower the energy barrier for new players to get in and get past the learning curve to a reasonable level AND it needs some new innovation that keeps the game fresh. something more than slightly altering the VoD mechanics.

It was the innovation that made GW a successful game over 3 years ago. People tend to be resistant to change, especially the few that are at the comfortable top. But again, it was the change, freshness, and innovation that made GW successful. What it needs now especially to bring in new players to the community in large numbers is to start over, put in due diligence and conduct anthropological market research and customer research, and introduce a fresh element to the game. to go back to the game's roots and philosophy, which was innovation.

No WotC is pretty bad at balancing. They have errata out as soon as an expansion hits the shelves. The only real competitive formats that they keep working at all are the type 2 tournaments, the buy our newest expansion or you can't play tournaments. For those formats they only focus on the last three expansions or so for balance. The gross incompetency comes from much olders cards used in type 1 and type 1.5 where there are many, many 2 and 3 card combos that just flat out win the game. That is far, more broken than anything Anet has done (well aside from when they accidentally made ranger interrupts have no recharge or aftershot).

Even then WotC only has to balance things according to one format. Anet primarily balances around GvG, but they do have to take into account HA, arenas, and PvE. Right now there are skills that are staples and amazing in GvG, that see little use elsewhere; skills that dominate arenas, but unused in 8v8; skills that are in nearly every pve team and would never be thought for pvp. No really, I am disappointed with the effectiveness of Anet's balancing, but they have a harder job and do it far better than WotC.

The original theory was that having additional chapters would grant more options, but it was still possible to make a perfectly viable build off one chapter (unlike, say, WoW, where someone with two expansions over you will also have a twenty-level advantage). It's probably even true... but the truly optimised builds tend to require skills from multiple chapters. Not necessarily because the new skills are more powerful, but because if the synergies they allow you to set up.

Still, regarding entry barriers? A new player still has the option to do what we did. Start with Prophecies, play that through, pick up the others if they so choose. Admittedly they may have problems with stuck-up PUGs, but if they're introduced by someone who's willing to help them out, they should be fine. Pick up the others when they're finished with the one before - no more expensive than following up with some other game.

And there's also the omnibus being released this month...

this (retiring skills) was regarding competitive play. ie some PvP- maybe not AB or random arena? it doesnt have any baring on PvE. it's like a previous poster said, the only MtG tournament that's at all competitive are the type-2 tournaments. (like GvG) it doesn't mean people can't play type-1 or type-1.5 casually with friends during their lunch break (like PvE).

It just so happens that my friends are more competitive players (likes pvp), which what you suggested doesn't lends itself to. Additionally, it's a little bit more challenging (and less fun) to play through less populated areas via PUG (ie playing through proph right after factions came out), esp when you're playing less desired classes. especially when powering through, laughing, and having fun in parties/guildies/friends. but again, that's irrelevant to this topic. picking up one chapter at a time doesn't really lends itself to competitive gw.

every mtg tournaments people exploit one or two game mechanic (white winnie, control blue). In gw people exploit the current meta game (Euro honor, rspike). What's the difference? I'm paying 150 bucks vs 9001 bucks to get the right cards and yet people are still bitching. Play the game and whine less imo.

This isn't whining, it's a suggestion. and i'm not saying they should implement it exactly as I say.

Comparing GW now to three years ago, even these forums, it's hard to ignore the decrease in activity (districts). guildwarsguru 3 years ago, the first 5 pages in Riverside Inn all had posts within the last 24 hours, now there's less than 10 such threads. only 150 active users are on this forum, instead of over 1500 a couple of years ago.

yes even mtg there are one or two colors that have slight advantages each cycle. "what's the difference?" THE DIFFERENCE: because skills get retired out, it keeps the game fresh. different colors rise and wane with each new cycle. the powers shift. even in magic, blue was initially always used in the 90s because of it's control ie counterspells. but counterspells got retired out for several cycles, which changed the game. made it "fresh". changed the mechanics of the game. people didn't have to go collect counterspells from past releases to be competitive. if you look up what the winner played each cycle, you'll see that at one tournament, it was red/green, another it was blue/black, in another red/black, then blue/red, then a red/artifact build. while and blue aren't the winning colors every tournament. each cycle, they also introduce something that changes the game mechanic, something innovative. first there was "banding". then "banding" got retired and "shadow" was introduced. "shadow" then retired for "imprinting", etc. it keeps the game fresh.

The difference is also, you don't have to purchase old overpowered cards from alpha, beta, limited etc to be competitive. or go to collectors and purchase out-of-print cards that are worth 500$.per.card in a 40card deck to be competitive, you just need to buy the current set (like 90$). in Contrast, with GW, you need to go back and purchase the previous "sets" you have to spend 150$ buying all three games instead of just 50$ buying the latest. yes, online and cards are very different, and result in different business models, but there may be validity to examining certain concepts of past successful business models.

In GW (and anything else), people exploit the current meta. but the current meta hardly every drastically change. even after one or two skill balances, the same build minus one or two skills stay the course of the current meta. because most of the skills remain in existence unchanged. it's a very slow and stagnant change. people get bored of it, and leave. you'd have to be ignorant to think there as many guilds still competitively playing as during the 1 year mark. and certainly, many more of the "active" guilds on the ladder currently are smurfs.

retiring chapters is one way to promote rise and wane of overpowered builds. introduce change. even when over powered builds arise, it insures they'll only last for that season and in the next chapter, some new innovative mechanic will be involved. new players and old will have more of an even start. and it will also help izzy's job who's task would be to balance a smaller set of skills.

I'm not saying new players aren't joining the GW community, but the trend seems to show that the rate people are leaving gw seems to be greater than the rate of entry.

again, this isn't a whine post. It's not that i'm disgusted that the game wont cater to me and my own needs. It's that i've seen and done it all, and it's the same thing over and over, same missions, same pvp builds. it's stagnant. I have other more new and exciting things that are happening in my life "Atlantica" is a fun simple MMO game, and I strongly recommend the book "Marley and Me" by John Gorgon for any young adult couples or dog owners, recommended to my by my gf and I loved it. also work, research, and sports. if Anet and life could publish my daily activities, that would be evident. it's not that i'm constantly logged in the game bitching about why the game won't play the way I and only I want it to. It's that the innovativeness that sparked the wave that was GW:P has continued with very little change for 3 years. you could even see that in my forum activity here and on GWOnline.

"Play the game and whine less imo." doesn't really fix anything. it just skirts the issue, beat around the bush, and turns a blind eye to the real issue. for the few that remain on the comfortable competitive top in the current population, there's more to life than being the big fish in a little pond (especially a digital one at that) that's rapidly drying up. the #s of current players proves it (another proof is that Anet has altered their business model which says something about the stability and longevity of the original business model). Like the majority of the population, I just don't want to play it because the novelty has worn. We all liked GW:P. and though we aren't as invested as members of Anet, we do want to see GW2 (and 3 and 4 ... and 10) be successful. because it was an innovative MMO unlike Ultima Grindline, Ever Crack, or World of Borecraft. it redefined the genre, or dare I say it introduced a new genre.

"Whine less and don't play the game" doesn't exactly bode well for Anet, and certainly, I liked GW:P enough to be here investing time writing all this, but not enough to log in and play for very long in the current state of the game. maybe I should have started off with my credentials, I used to be very active, PvX. on three teams that were in the top 50s and one of the first to beat the elite missions in factions, thanks to the lotus alliance (beta testers/dev members) and the first 4 people in the game to clear all 4 DoA zones only to find the bug that prevent mobs from spawning when trying to get to Mallyx (we used 4 heroes). (There was a huge thread on that in guru and GWO when DoA first came out if you want to search it. and got personal PMs from the devs to trouble shoot those issues.) Also two of my guildmates (we still chat and do stuff regularly as a guild, just not GW) went to PAX and the Private GW/Anet party. and their sharing their experience and their conversation with Regina inspired me to post here.

Some people are resistant to change. However, change is good, especially in this generation, in this day and age.

This concept reflects in other parts of the real world as well. When Apple first came into existence with their Macs, it was a change. A new PC, something better. but then Apple became complacent. they stopped changing, they thought what they had was good enough. if they had kept that up, Apple would have died. but steve jobs wasn't that dumb. he overhauled apple from the inside out, recruited the CEO of Pepsi, and promoted change. IPODs don't have traditional buttons that other MP3 players have. Mac book airs don't have CD-rom drives. change is risky, and some times they bomb, but it's that same change that has allow Apple to make a strong comeback. and it was change that made GW:P such an awesome game.

Thats because most of the broken cards in Type 1 are from like 13-15 years ago before anybody even knew what balance was yet. I'd say it is equivalent to spirit spam and other degenerate builds when Prophecies was first released. The problem is they can't outright ban these cards because many people who paid thousands of dollars to get them would be pissed off.

WotC has to balance around Type 2, Type 1.5, Type 1, Extended...thats equivalent to GvG, HA, arenas, PvE, etc.

I disagree with your overall assessment that Anet is better than WotC. I'm completely the opposite...I don't think WotC is a perfect balancer, but I think they are far better than Anet. Many times I feel like Anet has absolutely no clue what they are doing. I have never felt that from WotC. Have you seen some of the REASONING for balances from Anet? Some of them are a joke. WotC always has legit reasons for restricting/banning cards.

Nitpicking one point...

"buying the current set for $90 rather than $150 for all three games"

Notwithstanding that I'm dubious about whether you can get all the legal cards at a given tournament level for just $90, even in the US (possibly if you planned the deck in advance and went for the cheapest route to get the cards you wanted), the point remains that Guild Wars does have a much cheaper 'maintenance' fee nowadays - nothing, as opposed to having to replace your entire deck as cards get cycled out. I'm not sure how long the cycle is, but it's sounding awfully like a subscription fee to me...

You also seem to be ignoring that sometime around now, the cost to get all three games will drop dramatically. Heck, I suspect if you did it the old-fashioned way rather than the omnibus, you could probably manage to get Prophecies and Factions at least for a lot less than $50 each with a bit of browsing through bargain bins.

Still, that said... it sounds like what you really want is something like the 'sealed deck' tournament that I believe was done at a con a few years back - where players were given a set of skills to make a team build out of. I don't think replacing any of the existing PvP types with one with restricted skill usage would go down well, and the fact remains that GW is still only three editions (plus a few extras from EOTN) while as I recall Magic was in its fifth back in the 90s, but, if there's enough demand, would a seperate tournament with random skill restrictions satisfy you?

However, I don't think stirring up in such a fashion would really help - while looking at the number of districts exaggerates this (as the number of people that can be fit in each district has been upgraded at least once, leading to fewer districts), it has to be admitted that there has been a drop in player activity, which I'd argue is more to the lack of new content. Shaking up the meta by banning skills may help freshen things up, but may just as easily annoy people, and the proportion of people annoyed enough to leave only has to be approximately equal to the number that are brought in for this to be a zero-sum game.

The reason for this is that WOTC only has two tools: restricting cards, and banning them - after all, it's not really viable to print errata for a card's run. It's clear that they'd need good reasons for doing either. (Admittedly, they have done the equivalent of nerfing by introducing a weaker card with similar effect when an unbalanced card cycles out... but that only works for Type 2, I believe. But that's really their only tool short of banning for dealing with an overpowered card, apart from possibly introducing more powerful counters - which is one tool ANet doesn't really have for now.)

The point is, ANet has finer tools at their disposal, so they can afford to make a few tweaks for less solid reasons. I'm not saying they're perfect, but... I would argue that making a skill 5% less effective requires a less solid argument than removing it from the game entirely.

Point by point,

Yes MtG is like a subscription fee. GW has a subscription fee as well. it's just handled differently and cleverly disguised, In chapters. that was their business model.

for the sake of argument, lets say that GWP was released year1, Factions on year2, and nightfall year 3. If i decided to join GW on year3, to be competitive I would have to pay a backlog for year1 and year2. okay, yeah, you can nickpick this point too, but from a pvper standpoint, that's how it looks.

Next, at the release of GWP, and again for factions, and again for Nightfall's release, Anet had a very very very firm positions that previous chapters will NOT drop in price even after consecutive releases. simply because Anet would not be able to afford that (points back to the cleverly hidden subscription fee business model). sometimes the retailer's might bite the cost difference to clear space for newer more popular merchandise, you would not be able to find that discount from "official" sources. it wasn't till much after the announcement of GW2 and that your characters will not be able to freely travel back and forth from gw1 to gw2 (anet's change in business model) that the omnibus and price markdown was announced. because new people who hadn't bought the game yet will now be more discouraged to get the gw1 games (ie why should i pay 150$ for this when my character won't directly carry over to gw2, i'll just wait for gw2) without some other incentive that at least canceled that. (ie price mark down). I know this for a fact because i researched it and asked Anet officials both during the release of Faction and NF when I was trying to bring RL friends into the game.

Thirdly, while if they could electronically implement in game sealed deck tournaments, it would be interested. However, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm specifically thinking about two tournaments. One, the Wintersday tournament mentioned earlier that was NF+core skills only. and another tournament shortly after factions came out that was Factions+core skills only. The factions tournament was disappointing, because only the 16 teams that qualified were allowed to compete with those rules and ladder season to qualify for that tournament didn't have those skill restrictions, simply cuz they didn't have it hard-coded into the game and had to check it manually. (oh and of course, the prophacies+core only tournaments before factions came out).

also, i just want to stress yet again, that WotC have a easier time of balancing/alphatest each cycle for type-2 tournaments because they don't have to worry about balancing each cycle with the rest of it's history. sure there's only 3 chapters + 1 expansion right now, but if Anet stuck with it's original model, you can quickly see how 10-20 chapters and 1million skills later, the impossible task of balancing each skill with 999,999 other skills.

supposedly there will be less skills in gw2 - which is definatly a good thing

anet ruined a pretty balanced game by adding new profs and a XXXX load of skills that are impossible to balance. Its just impossible to balance a game with 600 skills and 16 professions on each time

Im still waiting to see what anet does with gw2 before I buy it - at this point my answer is that i wont.

the real problem comes with professsions that have to much variety (aka everything added after the main professions)

For example:
Rt spike ... Easily spec into your attributes to have a bunch of healing and be able to spike with that character AND still have the ability to chose a secondary professions and spec some points into that to accomplish something else in the build
Builds where you can just throw in a bunch of pretty much the same build and change 1-2 skills here and there = skill imbalance ...(more examples para spike / sin spike )

IMO the way anet needs to create character is to simply not have so much variety in a profession and keep the "jobs" of a profession specialized

(time passes)
was gonna type more junk but my boss bothered me so i forgot what i was gonna type zzzz....

Secondary professionms make life more interesting. Harder to balance, true, but more versatile and give the opportunity to find a really great combination. Which is then nerfed..... I kinda get your point now......

im not saying secondary professions are bad - im saying that when you can spec into two different fields in your main profession that do two totally different things - then have a secondary profession that accomplishes a third totally different thing - is where broken skills stick out like a sore thumb

this mostly refers to midline professions as monks and frontliners are pretty much focused (and their build is devoted) solely on accomplising their job , ie healing / dps.
the problem occurs say where u have 6-7 rts or paras on a team that have a ton of def and a bunch of heals / defense while doing DPS and can toss out a deep spike every 10 seconds or so. Or the pre nerf rt spike which is 8 healers with a 1500+ damage spike. ANDDDDD all these characters have secondary profs wide open that can add more imba to a "noob" build. Altough rts have been heavily nerfed i still consider it the most imba profession in the game solely based on the fact that there is so much variablity in random BS skills that rts can add to "junk ", "noob", "easy to play" builds. Now that i think about it sins are still very imba as well(moreso than rt) (i havent been active in the game for a few months so builds and stuff arent that fresh in my mind)..ill touch on my opinion on sins below

Things that are good:
monks speccing into divine a must (7+ attribute tiers used)
eles into energy storage
wars with str
mes with FC
ranger into expertise

Things that are bad:
Professions that add whole new aspects to the game: example: sins - teleporting around in GvG made the game a huge pain in the a**, very aggrevating and extremely frustrating boring -- LETS PLAY GUILD WARS - we can run around and chase horrible players that are in top 50 becuase they run around the map with sin split and teleport all over the f***ing place and pick off NPCs throughout the match

Adding New characters in hopes that people will "fall in love" immedatly: anet dosent want their new characters to be bust so they give them overpowered skills in hopes that people will start playing this new chars. Avatar of Grenth ...uh half the paragon skills ....

Characters that dont have to spec into the primary attribute to make the build viable:
Ex:
The sin in the rt spike build that just ran around ripping enchants before spikes and sometimes snaring .... A/mo KD crap sin SOJ, signet toxic , all versions of this garbage imba build

Bored of ranting , must go back to work

What you highlighted is exactly the reason Anet's game should be more balanced. And it isn't...

It wasn't my intention to turn this into a WotC vs Anet discussion, but rather what change/innovation would improve GW2.

Assassins never should have been implemented in the first place.

Anet had two options with a rogue class.
Give it some kind of stealth so it can get to its target easily so the target cant be preprotted.

Or make up something random that accomplishes the same thing.

Both choices take away posistional play from the enemy team, and thus anet should have slapped themselves, and said NO, this is bad. And scrapped the assassin class in favor of something else.

Don't forget the ritualist, who has only recently found himself a home on teams as a hybrid spiker/weaponmaster/party healer. And I still think the idea of defensive weapon spells are crap. At least when they can be maintained all match long.

The dervish was poorly made, instead of a godly avatar, or an enchantress, you have a melee character that abuses critical hits for massive spike damage.

Paragon was pretty crap too, the idea was sound, but the implementation was poor, now you got a shout spammer that has infinite energy, and no drawback. Far too many skills are energy based that should be adrenaline, and leadership shoult affect shout strength/duration, not energy.

Sins are heaps fun. 'nuff said. When did this become a discussion about shadowstepping?

The OP was about rotating out skills...... which I don't see happening. What if you bought, eg, Factions, finished the PvE bit, went to play PvP and found your skills had been rotated out? A bit unfair, methinks.

lets get back on topic plz...

i think retiring skills does have advantage
it gives new players direction as to wut to run
and it gives old players a fresh new game


rite now, gw has soooo many options
but very few viable ones

new players r confused in wut to run
how r they gonna choose 8 skills from 1000+?

while the old players r still runnin teh same builds as they did before
sure some skills add few variations...but the general teambuild generally has the same purpose and play-style

im sure the old pros -could- come out wit sumptin completely new?
but why bother, when their old builds r pwning nubs who have no clue wut their doin?


but theres sumptin similar to both ways:
there is only a few viable builds to play at one particular time


i think gw wanted to have a huge variety of viable builds to play at one time...
but, is this impossible?

tbh, i dunno if it is

Um, what else is there to say?

If you're going to introduce a new gameplay mechanic that completely bypasses part of the core game design/play, there *best* be some *very* strict rules attached to it.