Izzy no longer balancing GW1.

I'm not that into skill balancing i really dont see the point unless a skill is plain broken no matter what they change it only takes like 5 mins for the pvp guys to find a new best build that ppl cant be arsed with trying to beat

Don't tell that the GW2 economy is suffering as well!!? Worst Economic crisis to date? I think so.

Seriously?

Take a look at the progression of PvP.

gg

Actually, you're much like the other people in this thread fireflyry, in that you are also wrong. Izzy isn't the reason the balance changes were average, or that PvP has died. ANet have catered to PvErs since they realised that's where the money comes from. So because of this, a lot of Izzy's suggestions get knocked back, and PvP got put on the backburner to make sure that they got money from PvErs.

Izzy working entirely on GW2, which incidentally is very old news, means that the PvE balancers will get more input - so brace for horrible updates.

Seems to be unnecessarily self-explanatory really.

The advent of PvP/PvE skill differentiation really nullifies your point though.

There is easily room for segregation of skill ability and use now.

I don't see your reasoning.

It's pretty easy to connect the dots of PvP dying and I'm far from placing blame when the trends and history are proof enough.

IM Izzy has donean excelent job of balancing the skills, every decision has a repercussion and in most cases it wasn't astronomically bad.. that speaks for itself. If me or you where to do it we would have one mess of a game :s making ride the lightning do 9999 DAMAGES!! man...nomnomnom i wouldmake an omnislash special move that cripple, blinds and dazes for 200 seconds...

But yeah... Izzy has made the fatal error of creating immortality within the game, god mode perma's are the bane of GW and have been for a long time, they have had such an impact on the ingame economy and the so called "rare weapons" just aint rare no more but on a good note the do allow others to get into the harder area's and also be able to buy the rarest weapons for less.
To all my buddies, I have moved house and can't get online ( hope to be back online soonish though.

All consoles, even Steam and Blizzard, move towards trophies and achievements, why would anyone want an economy based on randomness, trade and exploitation? People like things that other people cannot copy by grinding away. People's wish to show off is the basis of the current economy, but it also spawns goldsellers and dupers, since the ability to showboat in the game is heavily linked to money earned by investing plain time.

Skill > Time
That's the big mantra, and that's what is pushing us away from gold and towards more of a trophy system. Non-transferable achievements which are then converted into prestige items to show around. Not just in PvP with capes and red items, but also in PvE. That is the future.

As far as the skill balance is concerned, it's only natural that some combinations are stronger than others. If it was any other way, we would not need more than 8 skills per attribute. An essential part of the game is not just how you can make use of your skills in battle, but also if you got the brains to choose the right ones.

It's enough if people believe in a skill#1 to be strong in order to make them play it. After a while they get really good at using it. Another skill#2 might be just as good, but people will not believe it, since they are far better trained at using skill#1. PvP is not just the balance of skills. You need to select the right ones, be able to use them, have the skill to pull them off at the right time and on top of that the right tactic against the right team. That's a lot of variables deciding the outcome of the match. Balance alone can hardly be blamed for everything. Top teams might know when subtle skill balancing will shift the tides of battle in favor of one team, but for the real masses of players, selection, execution and tactics will be far bigger determiners than the skill balance itself.

The Izzy did as best as he could do with what he had to work with, and took plenty of flak along the way; including plenty of flak from me truth to tell.

Balance is probably one of the most difficult tasks in any game. Good luck Izzy and thanks.

I can see this happening. *Put's hands together and says.* Please choose A.

Your post is correct, but you can't fully believe what you are saying in the bolded. Izzy absolutely had a role in the death of PvP. It is well known that his ideal theory of balance is to constantly tweak things to "shake up the metagame" instead of the better theory of tweaking things until the game is "perfectly balanced". Any balancer who thinks the first way will never be a good balancer.

1,200+ skills, 500+ armor/ weapon mods, 10 professions with primary attributes.

Your giving Izzy to much flame. If something goes up, something goes down.
For example, Palm Strike went up, Earth Shaker went down. Lichway went up, golemway went down. Tease heroes went up, necro heroes went down. 3 monks + 1 support went up, 2 monks + 1 support went down. Sway went up, Iway went down, Iway went up, and goes up again.

It's challenging to balance 2 skills on 1000+ weight scales.

Yeah, but he's also not the spawn of Satan like most people who are overreacting on this forum would like you to believe.

I think in basically every MMO ever, the skill balancers are almost universally called inept by the playerbase. So either all MMO companies just happen to hire only bad skill balancers (but the rest of their game can be ok!), or maybe it's harder than it looks.

this says it all.....

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...75#post4517275

Just had seven leachers in Aspenwood.

Balance is only a small problem compared to the pathetic excuse for a playerbase this game has lately.

It's hard to demonstrate the blame is all his, really. Nightfall killed PvP and it has never fully recovered since, and that is mostly because A) expansion classes and B) inevitable power creep of new skills are fundamentally flawed concepts. The most you can say is that Izzy has failed to restore the game to an earlier state.

Izzy has done a few okay and necessary things, but he's also done a few boneheaded things and has skill a few skills and attribute lines along the way. So I wouldn't call him a bad balancer overall, but he has made some bad calls along the way and didn't correct them.

This.

Even if tomorrow they nerfed one of the most constant skills in the game such as prot spirit or infuse. Everyone would be pissed as all getout, but honestly it'd actually be a positive change because with great adversity comes what the game is meant for...taking those other tons of skills and making a new way to work your way through a match/game/whatever, and that's what makes guild wars entirely awesome, and also why it's considered the most close pvp game to a strat card game like magic...or at least it used to be back when it first came out, it has much declined since that point was reached.

It doesn't matter to me, I always use the wiki skill feedback pages, if anyone cares about what people think about a skill, they should go there.

gj Lindsay and other dude!! So with less resources and very little at stake the new team shines. Bad news that other dude is doing gw2.

why does it allways feel like there is only 10 people working on these games, lol. one person for skill balancing, another person for this, that guy does that, lol

Considering how long things have been on that list, I don't think anet cares about skill feedback anymore or doesn't think that any of the remaining issues are worth dealing with.

I think if someone found a skill that upset the game, they'd probably nerf it, but beyond that I think we are going to be stuck with the skills as they are.

That's not Izzy's fault. Izzy has a boss who tells him what the community wants and then Izzy has to balance the skills to the best of his ability for what the community(as unintelligent as they are) is requesting. Yes Anet is a development house and the focus should be on the game...but it's also a business so even more so than the game the business aspect is important.

Don't blame the developers for ruining Guild Wars in order to keep the masses happy..they had to.


Side note: how many of you have played with Izzy or had in depth conversations with him (in game or out) about why he made the balances he did or what his thought process was? I assure you Izzy was quite good at his job. It was the average player that ruined GW

Your main problem with asking Lindsey to listen to the community, is a fairly simple one... WHICH community?

I just want to say something to all the people who think the game is unbalanced etc etc, do you play other games? This reminds me of all the shit Blizzard has to go through about how unbalanced WoW is and every one swears they are leaving WoW forever because AoC/War/whatever will get it right. and guess what? It is a hell of a lot better balanced than you think and players always come back. i want to thank meteor here, he gets it. Look at those numbers closely and realize how impossible of a task true "balance" is in this game. I think Izzy and whoever he works with have done the best they can with an impossible situation.