Am I not understanding something?

Whenever I Observe matches now all I ever see is the same 8 man team scheme, on both sides, and everyone uses the same builds copy and pasted from PvX.

What ever happened to diversity? You have so many skills in the game and instead of people going out and being original everyone just copies the same stuff. Its just weird for me because Guild Wars is a game with an assload of skills and combination's to choose from.

At least it wasn't so bad a couple months ago when I observed matches. Now when I actually see someone not running the PvX builds its like whoah! I bet they get criticized for that too :S

Lots of less than creative people in here !

yup pvp has alot of set bars, buildwars ftl

Eaiser to play something that was on obs and works consistently than to try and be creative and make your own build.

When everyone uses a build, it probably means that it is the most effective for it's selected purpose. In PvP where there is any skill involved, people use a build because they think it will work, not 'cus PvX said so.

Assuming that you are watching GvG, I think it is fairly safe to say that top tier GvG'rs are not PvX scrubs, and do know what they are doing. If you are watching HA, meh.

Random skill selectors for your skill set done as you map in.... boy would that add a twist

Creativity is often used as an excuse for being stupid

It's on PvX because top GvG's (or HA's?) are running it.

I lol'd a bit. People in GvG run that Me/N Corrupt barbs build now, and a few months ago everyone was runnning Dual MB Ele splits. We're just as retarded when it comes to creativity as HAers.

i noticed the same thing the other day. i was decided to watch some guild battles because i havent observed any in a long time, watched like 3 games and all 6 teams had the same build. it was pretty boring.

You're probably watching Euros, and Euros never switch builds.

This isn't even sarcasm, it's actually quite true.

That euro build isn't even on PvX.

from this alone i can tell you don't pvp.

many skills in gw yes, most of which are 100% useless, few of which offer the best compression and synergy. if you wanna go and cry wiki wiki wiki go ahead, but until you win with a team with 8 bars full of bad skills those cries will mean nothing.

its called the meta not pvxwiki u can run something different e.g a searing flames ele over a sh in HA but your heading for failure
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Marriage Advice Dicussion

Stale metagame. Everybody runs the same shit. Proven builds are more likely to bring in champ points than elegant unique snowflake creative builds that generally get stomped by what has already been proven effective and superior.

Welcome to GW.

GvG would get a real jolt if it was like the card game where the game limited you to certain skills after you entered. That would be hilarious. Lets say they give each side 3-5 minutes to get ready. Meta be damned.

I wouldn't say it's a case of people taking their builds from the wiki, but more a case these days of the wiki listing what teams are running. For most of the current meta builds, you'll see that they've been tagged as such.

As gifted said, the builds run by the "in the know guilds" are used for a reason. no-one is gonna run a fail build just to be creative. RA AB are great for trotting out the quirky builds.

If you create an efficient and effective build through process of elimination then serious kudos to you.

Otherwise youll see the same EFFECTIVE builds used and abused until there is a counter to it. The youll see that one used ad-nauseum.


Cronk

Everybody running the same builds does tend to allow the cream to rise to the top.

If your team is better than the other team, who's running the same builds, you should win!

The only variable in the equation is "how good you are" vs "how good they are"...

If you allow randomness into the equation, like a limited selection of random skills, then it's no longer "us vs them". In the short term, it becomes "our skills" vs "their skills," which may not be popular. It may be fun, in select formats, but not popular...

In the long term, however, with a large number of samples (matches), I do believe that it would be an even better gauge of who is a superior player. If you can adapt and consistently win with junk skills, would you not be the better player? (I'm just not convinced that you'd ever get that far, though, since I don't think that people would put up with it for long... It's too frustrating to lose because of a poor skill bar.)

I think that the randomness issue is also why there is an effort to remove heroes from PvP. For victory, there's a lessened focus on the skill of the player(s), since the quality of the heroes skill bars has an impact. I see this as the reason they want to move toward fixed henchie skill bars.

Welcome to Guild Wars. GvG stopped being creative when;

a) ANet stopped caring, and more importantly,
b) [rawr] started winning. You all know it's true. Once [rawr] started winning, guilds either ran their build, or specced against it.

All of the corners of buildmaking have been explored in Guild Wars. The only thing left to do is choose the best one, and play it.

At this point in GW time, the only way to get new builds into PvP is to have devs change the skills. Then you will see different skills appearing.

Until then, there is no reason to use different builds, they have all been tried and found wanting.

Part of the problem is we have very little motivation to experiment. I mean, there likely IS something SOMEWHERE out there that is "better" then the existing builds, we just haven't found it. But rather then risk losing trying to find that new build, people would rather play it safe and keep their ranking respectable by playing an established build. This wasn't as much a problem when GW was still new because there were more people playing (which meant more people experimenting who didn't care about their win/loss record).

The game is 4 years old, people know what works and what doesn't. And if we don't, copying whoever won the mAT is much easier than thinking.

just my outside opinon but it's as someone already said - bar compression.

When builds use to be varied and 'unique', it seemed that top guilds were taking the necessary skills that could deal with the meta as well as many variations they might run into. Basically getting as much out of the 64 skills to address as many situations as possible and then relying on skillful play to address/adapt (hence 'balanced'). This would eventually lead to others following suit removing the outside edges of the "bell curve" (along with skill introductions/ skill changes/ class introductions etc etc) to the point where the majority of folks are running virtually the same builds with the "most" flexability.

So you could be creatitive/ unique but the likelyhood of the 'template gvg build' being able to adapt to it is relative to the players using it (a good team should have the best chance to compensate).

elk

This would really shake things up and could make for some interesting matches.

Linsey said they were talking about Sealed Deck, actually. Doesn't mean it'll get implemented, but it would be fun.

Because any build that's ran to counter the meta is quickly labeled bad or overpowered.



Jayce Of Underworld

Why people run meta.

Its entirely because of the low game population. Right now it takes a long time just to get a GvG match. Last night my group gave up after waiting over half an hour for a match. There are just going to be a limited number of matches that can be participated in during a night.

Getting people together for a group and getting builds together takes time a lot of time. Sometimes it can take over an hour itself just to get the group together.

People don't like to lose. Sorry, but it is a fact.

Combine all of these and it should be very obvious that people don't want to wait around forever forming a group, waiting for matches, using up the limited time window for available matches, to do something 'new' when 'new' normally means you are going to lose. It really shouldn't be that surprising that most people want to run something that they know is going to give them a good chance at winning [meta].

But if you want to run something different then by all means, run something different. There used to be a time when every guild had their own build, that wasn't powerful enough to take the top of the ladder, but no one else every really took the time to copy and learn.

That to me made more sense than any other post...
It wasn't long ago that guild i was in took 30 mins to get together.. another 30 mins arguing on skills to try something else........ and then we sat there..... waiting for opponent............*tumbleweed.....20 mins later.."gotta go now"....... "yeah i'm bored too"....

Most of the meta has been deactivated to prevent what gets called “Build Wars”. Build wars was part of the original Prophecies game, and was the main cause of build variety. If you wish to feel what build wars felt like, you may play Random Arenas to get an idea of the most extreme part of it. In RA, sometimes you may face a hard counter, and other times you may be the hard counter. It becomes harder to deal with as the power levels of counter skills increase, because hard counters become even harder to deal with when you don’t have the right tools. When build wars was considered part of the bigger picture, hard counters often got tweaked. Build wars was deactivated in 8v8 by giving players the hard counters and killing the skills that countered them; so they don’t have to worry about being countered themselves.

With build wars phased out, people can run a narrow selection of builds all of the time, without having to worry about any extreme counters showing up and ‘beating them before the match starts’. A negative aspect of build wars was the ability to win/lose matches through just a randomized process of build selection. This felt worse if you ran a concept that you call ‘balanced’ that does not confirm a balance of the actual skills in play in the game. A positive aspect was that there was an ability to win/lose based on knowing what an opponent would run and choosing to counter it. This encompassed the strategy aspect of the game; now it’s mostly micro and execution (also encouraging teams to pool individual talent and build superpowers, leading to one build scenarios more often than not). Splitting is both a form of micro and macro; it becomes micro when you can do it the same way all of the time.

Only a narrow selection of builds are activated at a single time, to prevent build wars in the 8v8 game. You have to wait for skill balancing to change them to something else, or you can play something that won’t be as effective as what your opponent is running. Most of the variety that can fit in this type of game will be based on swapping around interchangeable components. Multiple frontline types (sword, axe, hammer, palm strike) that all do similar but different things is an example of what can be done.

Note that it is the dominant strategy that dictates what can be run, and whether or not there are multiple things that can be run. That means that the game is not yet balanced around the new tiebreaker. In a VoD meta, the options would all be based around however many VoD exploiting builds could be produced. But a lot of builds just won’t be viable because the strategies allowed by those skills aren’t viable (i.e. long recharges are bad when interrupts/removals are in strong, regardless of whether they do big damage).

Someone set up a system where you draw from a set of skill cards that each have a skill on them, and then those are the skills you have to distribute among your 8 man team.

I kept trying to get guilds in my alliance to try it, but they didn't bite. I don't even remember what the rules were or where to find them anymore.

This is only true because we expect skill updates almost monthly, although the last few months have been different....

If there would be no more skill balances then you would see people experiment more because they would have to. Right now why take the time to experiment and lose when given all the reasons reverend dr said? Anet is just gonna change the crap in a month or two anyway.

If there was no skill balancing though, people would experiment but only to the point to find a counter for meta. Then that counter becomes meta and we find the counter to that meta and so on and so on. So it is either Anet nerfs meta, or we continuously create counter metas. Either way, it is going to be stale because there aren't enough people who play this game for diversity to really take effect.

That is called Sealed Deck, what Earth was talking about earlier.
And Reverend Dr, very good post. Pretty much is what I meant to say with mine, but a lot more elegantly said.

this is one of the fatal flaws of GW IMO. even TA can take a long time to get a match... where are the people who realize that less wasting time and playing more can result in potentially more wins? Unlocked HA recently to unlock it, but then ditched that area and TA forever (though I'd probably try TA if people weren't so used to waiting around forever and all quitting the second you lose once, only to wait more for new groups and get set back up).

Allow people to only pick 3 skills for their bar and then just random the rest based off their prime/second + stat allocation + rez of some sort... That'll make things interesting.

We certainly wouldn't want skill to matter in our competitions, no sir!

If Anet wanted diversity they should have implemented sealed deck play long time ago.

There are still people that like to try and come up with new builds but they're a minority. The rest simply use what's known to work because all the build making, thinking and tunning has been done aleady on those well known builds.

Yeah, that's why I got bored of PvP. At least in PvE you change enemies by changing area.