Henchman Skill Bar Contest Winners!

If that is true, then they should have told us that to begin with instead of parading around this contest with wrong rules that was nothing more than a false way to involve the community. That just pisses off the community who followed the rules and expected the contest to be a legitimate good henchie bar contest.

As it stands, the community didn't need to be involved. If Anet wanted to remove all AI they could have just done it instead of using this useless contest.

Badda bing.

*cough* wrongo. everything can be compared to something similar on pvx, I suppose the only original thing is how the builds are used
http://pvx.wikia.com/wiki/Build:Me/a...7s_Degenerator

it's idiotic to think anet wouldn't realize people would copypasta meta bars. It's pretty obvious the originality guideline was only there to protect anet from idiotic lawsuits or licensing issues when they announced the winners. Regardless of whether it's enforceable or not, the winners claiming that their submitted builds were original means the liability is taken off of anet.

tbh, they could have just copypasted the costume brawl bars (see 1, 2), with res sigs added, onto henchmen and it would've been better than the winning submissions; those exactly fit the criteria of "...robust, general purpose builds, not some niche meta builds..." for the most part. and it's easy to see heroes would play the bars better.

ups?

I think it can be mutually agreed that if this was Anet's intention with the contest all along, they probably should have simply taken out Heroes and saved themselves the time and trouble, and focused elsewhere.

At least it's a lot better than the earlier AI for the skill (or lack thereof), and I don't see a lot of room for improvement.

The time in between checks seems to vary, seeing how they aren't capable of consistently interrupting 1 second casts (they'll only reach a 100% success rate with 2 second casts). The AI doesn't really care who is casting what, if multiple targets are casting then they'll select the one closest to them and fire an interrupt, regardless of the actual casting time of the skill they're trying to interrupt. While you can argue that's still too good, I'd argue that it has more to do with interrupts being broken. When Me/Rt heroes miss over 50% of their interrupts and people complain about them being "godly" at it then I'd argue that the real problem is that those interrupts are just too spammable. It's the same with hexes really, the more effective fire-and-forget hexes and mindless hex stacking are the more effective heroes will be.

All I can say is, Thank You A-Net for letting a bunch of pve players decide wich pve bars would be great in any PVP format, you couldnt have picked a more usless bunch of skills to force actual human interaction in the game, for instance, what fool is going to take a migrain mesmer henchman that cant be locked onto a single target LOL GG anet!!!

actually those bars are quite common in pvp. on humans, that is.

You might even close this thread... Anet will never admit they failed, this WILL happen again, we WILL be ignored and lied to again AND this WILL NOT be fixed because they feel they have to end this project and prove to us they were right.

Ye cuz migraine ownz in pve

Yoom, please don't do that. Do a bit of legwork yourself okay? Regina has posted multiple times in this thread.

Fril, the response to this contest has been pretty universal in the negative. I don't care what 'community' you are looking at. As I stated earlier, I was glad to see that ArenaNet is continuing to reach out to us by doing community involved events. Yes, this one had a poor outcome but I certainly hope that it won't deter them from doing more. I thought the concept of the contest was indeed a good one, and while it's hard to know the perception and the end result, I'm sure that ArenaNet has noted the criticism. I still appreciate the outreach though.

I... well, I don't really. I find it unimpressive considering the entire contest was a fiasco, from beginning to the end. They wasted entirely too many hours they could have spent improving the game in other areas for me to feel warm and fuzzy that they're asking our advice on stuff.

It's nice that they're thinking about the community, except... they aren't, really. Just look at Regina's responses to us in this thread. It was almost as if they included the community to have someone to blame.

It's a nice idea in theory. But reality is something ANet seems to have trouble grasping, and it shows every time they try to do something, big or small.

Of which the first response completely ignored the criticism, and the second response was torn apart. Maybe the third time is the charm?

So are we....unless we find out that the community was never needed to begin with and the contest was only an excuse to make us feel involved. The real point of the contest seems to be something completely different than what we thought was intended.

This contest was flawed from the start since the problem with the Hench has always been the AI more then the skill bars they have, not that those bars didn't need updating badly.

They never thought of one little fact when they came up with this contest. The bars had to be good, usable and yet not so good that the AI would abuse them and become more usefull then live players. This meant that the bars would be inferior from the start, then compounded with the AI flaws you get more useless Hench then you started with.

This should never have been a PvP contest, it should have been a PvE contest where you could create a powerful hench bar, possibly even 'boss' like and have the AI tweeked to balance it out. ie. the hench is offencive so it likes to agro or has a larger agro bubble, if the hench was defencive/healer it might run away if its HP drops to 25%.

Still flawed but in PvE nobody would notice or care.

I'm sure they have, but they've already shown that they will feign ignorance about it yet again like in the past; never admitting that they made a mistake, and will only say something like "in the future, we may consider (insert empty promise here)". But, if you're so stuck up to admit that you were wrong, how can you learn? This is neither professional or beneficial.

Regarding the outreach, the idea was good, but the execution was more important. This here from Regina:

pretty much confirms that they weren't thinking of the community at all. Assuming that that they knew PvX existed, they either:

1) Didn't care about those who actually bothered trying to play by their own rules
2) Didn't care about those who actually submitted those "winning" builds
3) Didn't care about this contest, period

The result was not pretty. This wasn't much of a community outreach at all.

Just for the record, I did acknowledge that in the first page of my message, albeit implicitly.

And I do. I know that many people post on Guru but play very little, if at all, the game. I know that there are some people with strong opinions that will not listen to what is said.

It's like for the April update. Guru threads started to show a certain "meh" (at first), but Regina and Linsey said it was a great success. We do not know the server numbers (I bet that they dropped drastically after the MoR nerf in PvE, hence the reversal of this change) but yet feel as we know them because we've read the forums.

Don't get me wrong, it's not to say that Guru is worthless. It's just that for this "kind" of thread (PvP topics? hot topics? ranting topics?) Guru seems like a mess or a Norn arena where you have to fight agains the "wisdom of crowds".

I'm not sure that many people do appreciate it as you do. For many people "failed" is simply failed, there's no distinction or nuance. There's no appreciation of the quantity of work behind the scenes (exactly like Guru, who thinks of people managing the server? organising the volunteers?)

People talk about the CMs' abscence. Without thinking for a minute that it's the week-end and they're not really supposed (or even capable, even CM has a process where you ask people's approval in the company) to work OT, although they usually do.

This was a pretty fantastically mis-managed opportunity.

I think the focus of the change should have been giving the heroes builds that are functional, effective, but never better played than most players.

I'm glad that Tainted Flesh is not in the winners because Heroes excel at using it; they are all-knowning. I'm sad that Soul Bind did win for the same reason. You'll see that Hench in heavy use. Using that Hench will become meta, and the only recourse will be to nerf Soul Bind by raising its recharge, or changing the skill bar (which may never happen).

Heros should never have skills that can harm themselves when used without critical thinking. Infuse is silly, Frenzy is bad, and Shock will be very limiting. Skills that can cause excessive exhaustion, lose all energy, or lose all adreniline should never have been allowed to be chosen. PBAoE skills force the AI to get up close, which is bad for casters.

Interrupts are a slightly different matter. Heroes can interrupt like gods, and that's not fair or fun, but it's another place where you can add an effectiveness. Power Spike or Power Drain are fine choices for AI, but skills like Cry of Frustration, Tease, or Power Leak have too great of a benefit or additional reward for completing a task that requires a test of skill. 4 interrupts on one bar is far too many.

If the goal really was to remove the worst aspects of Heroes from PvP, Anet has failed because of the excellent job AI does with Hex stacking and interrupting.

If the goal was to give viable alternatives to real players, Anet has failed because many of the bars are not appropriate for AI use and its limitations.

If the goal was to give the community a sense that their participation is valuable, and to instill confidence that the game is as great as ever, well... you know...

This could have been handled so much better, for many great reasons.

Thank you for fixing my post

So here are the listed facts about this thread to wrap this puppy up... or atleast until a Community Manager would like to add other info...

~ We were told to make original builds abiding by the no plagerizing rule
~ ANET broke this rule to incorperate meta builds widely used on PvX Wiki, a third party site, there by breaking their own plagerizing rule
~ Statistical Data (displayed by Regina) shows that 23 of the 40 builds were only submitted by 1 person. And only 2 builds were submitted by 40 of more people.
~ Although PvX is the center piece for many builds in this game... it is debatable as to wether one can produce a build on their own and have it not be on the site.
~ If ANET wanted to get ideas for builds without the community... they do have the ability to track players online to see what they run, and how to run it.... as per the skill usage tracker
~ There is a wide player base that feels that AI should be taken completely out of PvP areas of the game. Wether the build chossen for the replacement henchmen will be effective or cover the "removal" of AI is debatable...
~ Most of everything else, is speculation

In conclusion... even though builds can be submitted into the contest... the roots or guts of rhte build could be traced back to other third party sites due to its popularity, even though you made the build yourself. This will most likely be the stance of ANET... so I feel this thread basicully done unless a representative from ANET will state otherwise.

By asking people to do that, you are asking them to lie (and lying on a legal document like that is illegal, btw. And knowingly asking someone to lie on a legal document makes your company liable as well).

Almost EVERY ONE of those builds was copied and pasted from PvX AND obviously your team knows nothing about AI abilities or you wouldn't have chosen PLAYER builds for henchmen.


I would like to apologize to any person who tried to follow the rules of this contest and actually tried to use skills that the AI uses appropriately. I know how frustrating it must be to watch copy and pasted builds win over your hard work, and I hope you know that plenty of people are fighting this.

I feel there is pretty much just one core issue the people should focus on - bad builds.
Bad builds because they contain bad skills or bad builds because they contain skills that hench can not run efficiently.

Once these hench get into the game, you won't care in the slightest that someone got the crappy bar of wiki. All you'll care about is that the bar IS crappy.
So let's just focus on trying to get these bars fixed. Start a new thread, look at each bar, and give suggestions on which skills should be replaced and what WITH. And no need to say that it's ABSOLUTELY clear which skills should be removed because it's obvious that this ISN'T obvious to the person who approved these builds.

I think it's time we start looking at A.Net as if they were kids. There is no point in yelling at them that they are stupid, when instead we can at least try to explain to them why certain options aren't good or why something is better.
Because they won't learn anything from the yelling.
But they MIGHT from certain suggestions.

i think the problem is that the Guild Wars team doesn't play Guild Wars...
everyone who played Ha for only 1 week CANT BELIEVE that a henchman can do a snarer build, not now, not tomorrow.

A bot will never know the infinite possibilities and the consequent infinite actions to do in a match, so he can only make "always-functional" works, i.e. tainter, support,"brainless" pressure etc.

lol @ all snarer,infuser,nuker,caller(wtf??) builds.

MAYBE they will fix tha AI of henchmen for the use of frenzy, shock etc., but with the actual knowledges of the tecnology it's just impossible to fix the AI for the 70% of the builds.

p.s. sorry again for my bad english :\

Guru is as much a representation of the community as the community is of the playerbase. If you think ArenaNet should take the community seriously then Guru comes right along with that.

As has been pointed out before, Guru is the single biggest Guild Wars fansite. It has an international membership, with a solid cross-section of the huge European and American player bases. It also has a mix of PvP and PvE players, with varying goals, play-styles and achievements. If you are trying to imply that Guru is not the single best place to find feedback from the community, then I would ask you where else should Martin and Regina go? Of course an aggregate from all sources is the most desirable, but it is only worth the sum of its parts, and Guru is the most valuable.

Of course their is a level of cynicism and spite floating around, you will find that in pretty much any 5 year old gaming community. I can promise you it is not exclusive to Guru, and neither is Guru a particularly prime example. Even the dedicated German community over at Wartower gave Martin hell for this contest.

And yes, there is some skill in reading between the lines and understanding mindsets required to work through the ridiculously poor signal/noise ratio of a forum community. That's what a community manager does, and I don't think you need to remind Martin, Regina or Inde of that. They all have a remarkably nuanced understanding of how online communities work, having worked with them for years.

Your continual assertion that Guru is a poor representation of the community is both tiring and ridiculous.

Here's a quick review of the GvG builds and potential problems the AI has with them, I might review the HA builds later:

I didn't copy/paste all the skill bars here (yet), you can find them at the official site for now:
http://www.guildwars.com/events/cont...vg_winners.php

I Will Win Ff:
- Bull's Strike is questionable without a permanent speed boost, the AI simply queues the skill. The AI needs skills like Primal Rage to actually hit moving targets with their bull's strike more often.

Leet T H E O R Y:
- Hammer bash will often be used instead of Magehunter's Smash, removing the adrenaline gained for the latter skill
- The AI will also follow up Enraging Charge with Hammer Bash and by doing so immediatelly removing the adrenaline gain from Enraging.
- Death's Charge isn't used offensively by the AI
- They'll often get stuck in Flail because Enraging is recharging or they ran out of energy, or they queued a different skill instead of Enraging.
- Bull's Strike is used inefficiently for reasons noted earlier.

This Is Trigger:
- The AI uses Shock on targets who are already knocked down, and uses it too often, exhausting all of their energy. Replacing Shock with Enraging Charge would make this a far better hero build.

Etron In Vitro:
- Not much to say regarding specific AI problems, but I don't think Cripshot is a good choice for an AI controlled ranger.

Lulu Xan:
- Will quickly run out of energy even with maxed out expertise
- They overwrite Lightning Reflexes with Natural Stride

Tannaros Tower Rush:
There's not much that can be done to improve AI skill usage here, we know the AI can spam hexes at least.

Cassie Santiago:
- The AI will rush into the frontline to use Hex Eater Signet (they'll run towards and use it on any hexed ally within spell casting range).
- The AI seems to use Discharge Enchantment regardless of whether or not the foe is hexed, the skill should have a lower priority on non-hexed foes (this is somewhat difficult to test so I can't be 100% certain this statement is accurate).

Sacred Wolfy:
- The AI can't weapon swap so having Guardian and Patient on the same bar seems like an odd choice for hero AI.

Il Juliya Il:
- Aura of Stability isn't a terribly good choice for the AI in my opinion, they just don't know when they should use it.

Bellicus Magnus:
- This'll work.

Dark Rising Shadow:
- Where Glyph of LEsser Energy on this bar? I doubt Signet of Lost Souls is going to be enough energy management on this bar, no matter how good the AI is at using it.

A Papaya In There:
- Gale = exhaustion = bad choice on heroes
- As a warrior you only have to be "not attacking" for even one second and the AI will slap Weapon of Warding on you, I'd rather use Resilient Weapon which is a much more suitable skill for heroes.

Luzy Of Fire:
- The AI usage for Distortion is just odd, I never understood what triggers it, all I know is they're terrible at using it.

Mala Aurora:
- The AI will use Freezing Gust and immediately follow up with Winter's Embrace , which isn't exactly a good combo (not exactly a major issue)

Hajime Hinata:
- Freezing Gust -> Ice spikes (same issue as above)

Saint Reapers Sin:
- This is just terrible for an AI skill bar, one of the off-hand -> duals needs to be removed and replaced with utility skills, might as well drop flurry as well since they don't maintain it when they should anyway.

Pseudo Antipathy:
- Spirit Siphon relying on a 45s recharge spirit? The build will run out of energy outside of sway, I really don't understand why there's no Caretaker's Charge build for the henches.

Zen Si Ert:
- This should work.

Aria Of Nerf:
- The AI really needs to learn how to maintain Aggressive Refrain (letting them spam Anthem of Flame on recharge should do the trick).

Aurora Alessandra:
- See above.

Conclusion:
From what I see Anet just went for the popular builds, how the AI uses them didn't seem to be much of a factor. It makes sense seeing how reviewing 30.000 different builds without comprehensive knowledge about the individual AI skill usage is an impossible task. Perhaps they just thought they'd fix the AI later.

They made a VoR and LC henchman?

Original much? All I see is a bunch of meta stuff that won.

Also, I hope Anet's programmers know how to make the Henchman use SoC and make haste in HA at the right time. I would also love to see those henchman in HA try to snare any runners.

Anet, stop trying to find a magic bullet that would fix everything (it's not there). Try fixing the problem at hand first. HEROES/HENCHMEN (COMPUTERS) were never meant to be in a PvP ONLY MAP.

agree, however i think some of the bars need a complete change to the point of where the new bar will not resemble the old bar in the slightest. therefore, some henchies would have to require starting from scratch rather than simply working with what we have so far.

Drats. And here I was actually proud that I came up with something that wasn't on PvX. Mind you, I did think in the back of my mind that surely, someone must've already submitted a degenerator to PvX close to that one.

After all, there are only so many degen builds you can make.

Cool, Frenzy on henches. Maybe this will force AN to actually notice "huh, something is wrong with the ai, how coem lolz".

yes it can, Guild Lord/Doppelganger/Ghostly does it if you didn't notice; tho Anet 1. wouldn't bother with this 2. wouldn't know that they are supposed to bother with it.

another thing: necro/mesmer bars are terrible, not working is not the problem there, it is how broken they are.

I was pretty sure a few hundred/thousand people were going to submit caretaker's, or trust me I would've. I'm actually very surprised there aren't 2 rit heroes for GvG, I expected a caretaker's just as you did.

As for me putting in siphon. I was like henchies suck with energy /siphon. Couldn't think of another skill with energy benefits that wasn't an elite that henchies would use properly. From what I've seen, they don't do too well at holding an item then using a skill that gives energy while holding an item, etc. So it was just to help with energy a bit *shrug*.

I'm sure Anet will end up changing some of the bars down the line, I would've expected them to use the bars submitted more as a template to build on/change than to have set in concrete.

Fair enough, but I was referring to heroes and "normal" henches. The problem is if they make an exception for one hench, they'd basically have to code specific weapon switching AI for all them.

They shouldn't have much problems with those. Caretaker's Charge, Essence Strike and Soothing Memories was a popular combo used on Rt's in Hero Battles.

I have a question in regards to people's opinion in relation to the naming of the henchmen.

What is considered Guild Wars theme based?

I've heard lots of people who have won whose names are not considered acceptable and must be "Guild Wars" themed. Wouldn't a majority of the winners want their henchman named after them?

I could see something like The Beefer K E K E not being acceptable, but I guess I am wondering what the boundaries are for the names.

From what they suggested to me, it seems they're looking for simple, one-name names that fit with the overall theme of the game. The suggested name for mine is a play on the last name of most of my characters, just modified a lot due to obvious copyright reasons, heh.

Had to Google Malfoy to find out who would object. -Yeah, don't want to upset that lady and her lawyers.

Imo, you should go with Aurora, Nicole or Malia. They're right up with Alessia, Eve.. etc etc... After all, you'll always know - that tonic will keep reminding you.

Speaking of lawyers, got any names already, or are you not allowed to disclose?

Interesting posts by Joe Kimmes (developper on the Live Team) on his wiki talkpage:

You, sir, just pwnt A.net.

AAND as usual, A.net regards no posts or some of the nonimportent posts instead of legendery posts such as this one ^.

C'mon, Regina, just say that you lied about the rules or chose to not act by them when judging, you're sry/whatever, the community will rage a li'l and we'll meet next when you fail next. My guess is the big october update. No, actually, the next update.

Also, the guy about the illegality of the signing - I lol'd.

It'd rock though to convince one of the guys who won to give their prize up saying he took it from PvX. I'm not sure anybody would agree, but making it happen would be so good. And I wonder what would A.Net do.

Someone here feels good to give up his prize? Its only a super rare minipet that's worth thousends of ectos. Now, when thinking about it, I actully see what anet did there:
They picked some builds, and now they are bribing the winners in virtual property in order to prevent them from calling up A.net's bluff.

That's a conspiracy. Ya.



for the tl;dr people:

QFT, we need to make some people give up their prize saying they copied it from PvX. It'd be epic.

I think the problem with this is they are trying to make complex skills fit to work with AI, and I just don't see it happening. They would have been much better served doing one of their other options (as mentioned throughout this thread).

Frenzy for example, is one of the best skills in the game when used properly and one of the worst when used improperly. The skill requires an awareness of the battlefield, your position, and the enemies position...something theres no way in hell they can program the AI to do. You can program the AI to cancel it when they get to 50% life (which is bad) or you can program the AI to cancel it when they get hit at all (which is still bad).

Infuse is yet another case. Although in this case it has the potential to be broken, because they possibly COULD program a nearly perfect infuser. With a perfect infuse AI nothing would die and it could catch every spike, and with a bad infuse AI (like we have now) it wastes energy or gets itself killed.

So either the AI is going to be bad and nobody uses it or its going to be too good and everybody uses it. To summarize, the entire concept of AI in PvP was bad from the start. Sadly the PvP community is so small now that I don't think it would really matter if they allowed 7 heroes into it anymore.

Finally, has anybody at Anet addressed this debacle of a contest yet?

One-name names would be a logically option if they could actually let you have one-name names on your regular characters.

The prime motif of any contestant winner is going to be placing their character name (both words) as the NPC's name.

This partially gives definition to who you might be as a player established in this game.

Example: Name a character Divine. Is it after Divine Ambassador? Divine Nine? Etc etc?

People will want it to be named after them. I guess we will see what happens.

It's great that they can tweak Frenzy so that henchmen might not be quite so terrible with it, but it's like putting a band-aid on a car crash victim.

As has been said, you could have much more original, functional, desireable and less degenerate bars with nothing but a bit of thought. They would require no tweaking to be playable, and any tweaks they got would only serve to make them even stronger.

I strongly suggest they let the winners keep their prizes and choose the names but redesign the bars from the ground up.

I strongly suggest that they sack the whole contest, do not give out the prizes to people that don`t deserve them. Breaking the rules should never result in getting rewarded.

After that the whole team of judges should apologize not only to the "winners" but to the whole community for RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing something as easy as this up.

@Joe Kimmes: I can not even "rest assured" that ANet sticks to THEIR OWN SET OF RULES!!, because of ANets and/or the LiveTeams incompetence.


No one in this forum or the whole community would just role over if they didn't win 100000 dollars because ANet decided to not stick to their own rules. We now see what ANet did in this contest and in the April tournament "ruling" and can we be sure they wouldn`t have done something similar in the 100000 dollars tournament? ANet has to stick to their rules in EVERY CONTEST!

Taking away prizes from the winners might be too hard.

I would merely take away the henchman names. Look, it's not a secret, and EVERYONE knows it:

The skillbars were selected completely at random. They did NOT look through all 30.000 bars, otherwise they would have selected better bars (mine included).
I think it's also safe to say the majority of the winners have nearly no PvP experience, on top of the fact that they KNOWINGLY BROKE THE RULES. (Select wiki bars) On top of that, some actually forgot that "player bars" don't always work on heroes, and therefore is proof that these submittions comes from VERY unexperienced people. (Coward * cough *)

Should that really get awared by henchman with their names on it in every PvP outpost and GH?

Every time I'll log on to GW, I'll see the names of "cheaters" -I'm really sorry for the winners, but it's true, tough not your fault- on a prestige spot (You'll be in EVERY district) taunting me, pretty much saying: "You played by the rules, and therefor lost the competition".

Regardless of etiquette, and respect towards the winners, they do NOT deserve such a prestige spot. They can keep the tonic reward, it's only cash, but they definatly do NOT deserve a permanent reward.