Why cant they announce changes before the actual update?

In that three month time WoW went through, 3.09, 3.10, 3.11, 3.11a, 3.12, and 3.13. 3.11a was a bug fix so don't have to count that one.

I would considered this a bad thing, a small group of testers, one night of testing, and one person making decisions just sounds like a terrible way to balance a massive game with 400+ skills (and judging by the current state of the game I might be right).

That sounds great, they sure proved they can balance Guild Wars 1 so they are bound to get Guild Wars 2 balanced. /End Sarcasm

Do you somehow think they are going to magical become "Balance Guru's" and everything is going to be peachy?

Wow amazing 1 patch every 2 weeks for a game you pay $685 to play. I paid $39 for GW and they patched the game sometimes 3 times per day, the servers only went down once, for 12 hours, when they moved the servers to NCSoft Texas across how many years?!??. If you think WoW does things better then you are stupid.

Almost all competitive games are balanced by small focus groups made up of professional gamers and game designers. There are plenty of dev docs on how competitive games were balanced. Street Fighter has been well documented on how they balance it, and that is a game that can't have any patches since it's an Arcade game.

GW was exceptionally well balanced until Factions came out. Even today it is far superior in terms of balance compared to other games like WAR, WoW, AoC, Darkfall, and RoM. GW's balance is not perfect but it's in a class of it's own compared to other games.

They already are very skilled when it comes to game balance. They have a long and proven track record. Some of the mistakes they made in GW past were having large unfocused tester groups, almost entirely consisting of PvEers rather than PvPers & Competitive skilled players. They wont make these same mistakes twice.

Your argument was they patch a lot less then Guild Wars and have less patch notes when actually they seem to patch more and provide more information to the customer. Now how does server uptime and cost relate to patch notes?


I can not even see a reason to compare a complex game such as Guild Wars to an arcade game such as Street Fighter. I have very little knowledge of Street Fighter but don't characters have a set of skills predetermined? This would take out many variables and thus reduce the amount of testing needed. Would comment on the “Professional Gamer” thing but that was just too funny.

I agree, Prophecies was the best balanced, and even it had some balance issues, like being able to go AFK while Attax were hitting you and coming back ten minutes later to kill them. Each time ANET added more skills they had power creep and failed to balance existing skills with new skills. So now they are going to create a new game and reduce the number of skills, kind of sounds like the education system of the United States, too many people are failing so dumb down the test.

Ok this was funny, almost lost my soft drink on that one. So A.Net has been balancing the game based on mostly PvE in the last five years? The developer notes and patch notes don’t seem to reflect that statement. During game development testers are used to for game setup with the focus of these group based on your intended market (casual gamers in this case) but since EotN was the last game released 2 years ago I don’t buy the PvE is messing up the game balance, nice try.

They do patch less. Maybe not in the last 3 months, but in total they definitely do. It's not even close. My point is, for how much you need to pay to play WoW, you sure don't get a lot of "customer service". And how is releasing patch notes in any way good? What is the point? Why do you need patch notes a week early? They do absolutely nothing for you. If you want to read something and ponder over it, buy a book. ArenaNET should never release patch notes early, because there are too many people that flood forums with topics on how a certain change or skill isn't balanced. It's annoying. Everyone thinking they could do a better job is the most annoying thing in this community.

A fighting game is just as complex to balance as Guild Wars. And why is the "professional gamer" comment funny? It's almost as if you have no argument so you're just deflecting.

The large grouping of testers, which were responsible for all of the PvE/PvP balance changes during BWE's and the first 3 years of retail, were almost entirely all PvEers with next to no background in gaming, competitive gaming, and game balance. They were just regular people posting their opinions, and that is no way to achieve balance.

streetfighter 2 turbo, despite being ~16 years old, currently has a competitive scene bigger than GW had at its peak.

In terms of game balance (talking about PvP here) GW is exceptionally well balanced compared to other games. Sure there are the few overpowered/underpowered skills or whatever, but they will always be there, it is impossible to make a perfectly balanced game. Using WoW as an example here again, the game revolves around gear not skill, doesn't matter how good you are, if you don't have enough stamina/resilience to survive being 1 shotted by some mage with a zillion spell dmg, ur screwed.

GW at the very least puts everybody on equal footing, no fancy gear, same attributes, same spells the works. While a system like this has its obvious drawbacks, in PvE for example, it has its benefits. I got sick of getting destroyed by players in WoW who played the game 8 hours a day and simply had better gear then me, come to play GW from WoW and damn, there's a huge difference.

The only way around this really is to have everybody's gear normalised for PvP, this is something I really hope they add in GW2, keeps PvP balanced power wise, but is a huge boost to the PvE aspect of the game.