Update - Thursday, September 17

Already been explained in this thread somewhere in more detail than I care to go into.

My short explaination? P > E and S > P, so S > E.

PvP has a completely different gameplay dynamic than PvE. Re: that equation, there are all sorts of examples in professional sports where team P dominates team E and team S dominates team P, yet team E dominates team S. Just look at the Vegas odds to see that the betting probabilities don't follow that nice little equation all the time.

As a case in point, suppose they changed Grenth's Grasp to "Cause a 50% reduction in foe's movement speed (25...120...150 seconds) with your attack skills." It would be the new PvP meta, yet PvE players would just shrug.

Like I said, fallacious logic.

But, you're a person who thinks that other people playing with heroes somehow hurts your PvE experience, so I can't say I'm surprised.

Interesting logic... the game doesn't need hard counters (except for enchant removers)... But, the fundemental issue still goes back to the PERCEPTION that there is no NEED to bring a stance remove in your bar. If players perceived that stance removal was significant, then people would use them in their bar (but it's not perceived that way and is only available in 3 classes anyway). Instead, 2 more stances get nerfed, because THEY were the only significant stances than NEED to be removed. Oh yeah.. I forgot about distortion from years past. Broadly accessible stance remove with utility damage/penalties would achieve the same result (if only players could detect that someone else was already in a stance)

Transitivity is axiomatic in mathematics and preference relationships in economics. Doesn't mean that transitivity holds in all settings. For instance, rock-paper-scissors is intransitive by design. Cycling problems in group preference selection are another example. It's possible for as few as three people choosing from three options to find it impossible to reach a stable consensus about which alternative to choose.

Any interesting strategy game is inherently intransitive, by the way. If it weren't, there's a global optimum and strategy drops out. Both you and your opponent know what the other should do, and it becomes simply about who executes the plan most efficiently.

Most FPS games are an example of the latter type of game. The disconnect on whether or not strategy should be part of the game also creates friction in GW; some people love Build Wars and some people hate it.

Which is critical to keep in mind. The maximization functions in PvE and PvP are very different. You're maximizing the same function anywhere you go in PvE: minimize time invested to accomplish task. If you're money motivated, there's a second maximization function drawn from the solutions to all of those functions - maximize in-game cash per unit of time invested.

PvP works differently. You're always maximizing one of two functions there - maximize damage output for fast wins or maximize survivability retaining JUST enough damage to kill things every so often. The former tends to be the modern HA function (with the additional constraint of certain utility skills for different maps), and [rawr] proved the latter to be the efficient GvG function until people figured out how to game Izzy's vaunted tiebreaker change.

In short, even if the skills were identical it would not hold that a broken skill in PvE is broken in PvP and vice versa. Protective Bond was never used in PvP. Spirit Spam's NR owned it. (Back then NR was a universal, continuous Rend until it was killed, and you could have (many) more than one.)

If we assume that he prefers to play with skilled people, it is obvious that the existence of heroes negatively impacts him.

But skilled players don't want to play with people like him, that's why we play with H/H: because PUG players are extremely rude.

They would shrug because they have better options, not because that skill is necessarily bad.

I'd argue not. Either way it is better than no logic.

False...but I guess anything I post will go in one ear and out the other anyways.

Fine. But I think it holds here.

Nobody loves Build Wars in its purist form...that is...the game is over before the door opens. BUT, some people do enjoy the creativity behind builds. I think the idea is to allow for all types of gamers to be able to play the same game and have fun with it. It sort of goes hand in hand with balance (which is basically the point of this thread even though we are semi off topic).

Most skilled players already left this game and were replaced by H/H players. Get back on topic.