The Henchmen contest is counterproductive to the Live Team's goals and here's why.

Right, so, with the newly added NPC, everyone can submit their own new Henchman bar for GvG/HA. Cool innit? No more teaseway in HA, or RoJ's in GvG. Arenanet has promised to spend quite some time in selecting the winning skill bar submissions and new henchman names, judging them of course to approriateness, and effectivity. Yay.

Since we all know, however, how busy the Live Team's schedule is, and their resources are limited, this will probably be pretty time- and money-expensive, judging each submission manually. Eventually, this should lead to some decent henchmen that can be used in GvG and HA. All with nice little skill bars, as part of the PvP love programme.

But wait.

Whats gonna happen when they update the skills in a new skill balance? Some henchmen will be nerfed to death, others will be made OP. Ok, so it's not so extreme, but still, if you want the henchmen to remain a half decent alternative for other players, they will need to be updated regularly, because as we all know, new skill update = new meta, new meta = new builds, old henchmen builds that don't fit in new meta = uh oh.

See where I'm getting at? It will take time and resources from the Live team to update those henchmen in the future. And this is exactly in contrast to the Live Team's new goals. According to Linsey, they are trying to spend less time on doing 'maintenance updates', and more time on actually bringing something new. This could end up in two directions: A. The henchmen will never recieve any more updates after the new ones have been released and will become obsolete in a matter of months (well, maybe longer, looking at the relative infrequency of skill balances since January), or B. The henchmen will still be updated constantly, and therefore the Live team will need to allocate (in my opinion) too much time and resources to it.

Either way, to me this sounds like something that isn't going to work.

Meridon

Nobody is going to use henchmen in pvp anyway.

Its not about it being productive or not. It's about acting like they actually still do care about the community of GW, at least until GW2 ships.

It really depends on what kind of skill bars they select. If they can choose bars that are going to be more or less timeless and can be run acceptably by AI, then the henchmen will be used.

Perfect example is Tainted Flesh in Heroes Ascent. It's been a useful and desirable character template for years, is run well by AI, and is usually considered really boring for human players.

This, stuff like Shock Axe, ESurge Mesmer, Cripshot Ranger etc, are all still decent bars that will relatively never be touched.

I suppose that's why the Test Krewe is being formed.

I agree with this.

The contest is just for some community fun.

I agree that the contest is for fun and community involvement. ArenaNet could quite easily stick in henchmen with nice useful builds with no input from players outside the company. But they have chosen to involve PvPers in making the decisions on what would be the most useful builds to have on tap when you are short handed.

If you don't like the idea, then don't enter the contest. The rest of the community is willing to have fun. This is a game after all.

And OT, as Edwards and DarkNecrid said, ANet is sure to pick builds that have been proven to not be overpowered, so won't be getting nerfed.

Who knowns if they already know builds they gonna choose... they will just have to match players inputs...

Just submit average builds with firstorm etc... that any new meta wont break anyway...
It is not supposed to create Henchmen Ascension, just offering acceptable fillers for starters/bored people while removing heroes to remove heroway and else from this format.

This.


It doesn't matter if the hench bars are slightly better. Hench are still hench. The only reason people take hero's is because they can be loaded with specific skills that the AI abuses for the purpose of a teambuild, and most importantly of all-> they can be microed.

No one will take a predetermined Hench bar. No serious team will use this shit. This entire idea about "improving henchmen" anet has come up with is nothing but a massive waste of developer time.

The only way henchmen will be used is if you are in an AT and someone lags out about 20 seconds before you enter the battle and you don't have time to replace him and he wont reconnect in time. You just have to add that henchmen, hit enter, and play so that you don't end up getting an unfair forfeit due to lag. Chances are you still will lose, but if the henchmen has a halfway decent skillbar, then a good guild can still beat a weaker guild if they play smart. I've honestly seen guilds win 7v8 and making it look fairly easy, so having 1 mediocre henchmen for some guilds wouldn't really mean an automatic loss.

Other than that they are useless, but it is worth putting in just for the slight chance of the event I explained happening. It at least allows some people to play the game if something stupid happens.

agreed.

12 characters

I think a wounding strike spammer ranger is a timeless build that would survive nerfs, amirite?

the bars they will use will be updated from time to time and so on

hey meridon
---if you share the same agenda as me and want heroes to be involved in gvg and HA, link my post http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...41#post4828941 to ur post. we are gathering up all the support we can to change the update change---

Hmmm....
Henchmen with new and "improved" skill bars that are subject to skill balances or....

Henchmen with their current skill bars that are subject to skill balances?

But the OP does bring us a good point - How much NPC skill bars (henchmen, allies such as Togo/Mhenlo in Vizunah Square, and enemies) looked at when evaluating skill updates?

Where did they say that?

Actually I'm not in favor of keeping heroes in GvG and HA. I think it's too easy to exploit their AI, in terms of interrupting and hex/condition removal. Way too many times I've seen players running gimmick builds packing 3 or more monk smiter heroes with RoJ or whatever. Yes, we do still beat them, but it's just lame.

In this situation, I think the best thing to do is just to remove heroes and henchmen alltogether from GvG and HA, or to not bother with updating the henchies and just keeping the current ones. It's way more efficient in terms of time and resources compared to the actual result.

If you think of it this way, when players in HA leave their team, they're replaced with a henchman. The henchmen right now aren't that spectacular, so it's nice to give the players a chance to create their own builds with the hope that one of them will be the replacement for their team.

Granted, they're still AIs, and still won't be great, plus there's the aging issue with the bars being nerfed/buffed in and out of play.

I just can't imagine how are they realistically going to select the winners, I expect there will be dozens of thousands of submissions to dig through. Not every bar can be dismissed as bad by just looking at it, and it always matters who is actually looking at them. Still many will require some thinking or even testing... just imagine getting swamped by 50,000 skillbars...

That and sorting through all of the applications they've received for the Test Krewe.

Just remove the AI helpers altogether and save the complaining. If you can't get enough human players then dont pvp! Simple as that!

Unless you really enjoy getting your ass handed back to you by using stupid AI that even shoot at walls...

Exactly. Test crew's applications and skill bar entries just take too much time and resources for a Live Team that has admitted to have so little of both.

Meridon

There is an easy way though. They have already decided on the bar, so they just sort through the entries and select the ones that are identical or closest to it.