Henchman Skill Bar Contest Winners!

So, for example, the Magehunter warrior. You honestly want us to believe that the AI will be tweaked that it will shadowstep, magehunter, crushing blow, wait for target to get up and then hammer bash? Oh, and that's after it builds up adrenaline if it used enraging and flail in a competent manner. Same goes for the Wastrel's sin and the majority of the other bars. You honestly think it's just going to a be "tweaking" of the AI?

I think it's time for us to move past this little situation and into another one:

What kind of names will we get? Specifically, for those of you who won, what do you plan to name your winning character?

Also, one person getting an unique tonic seems rather... um... well, you're going to have to draw a lot of attention to get people to notice you with the tonic applied.

The dev team has stated to me that the reason certain builds were chosen is because they're effective, they work for the game, and they meet their overall design goals for those formats.

Each winner will have to sign and return a Declaration of Eligibility and Liability Release form, confirming that they are eligible to participate in the contest and that they have obeyed the rules of the contest.

This contest isn't exactly like submitting a piece of art. Every single person has access to the same building blocks, so it stands to chance that multiple people will have independently thought of and submitted the same or similar sets of skills. By signing and returning the release form to us, those winners are declaring on a legal document that they thought of those builds themselves.

In some cases where multiple people submitted the same set of skills; the winner was determined by a die roll.

Another note: remember that Guild Wars is always changing. The design team may decide to modify the henchmen in the future if they feel it's appropriate, this includes tweaking their AI, or even changing their skills.

These were the guidelines as listed in the official rules:

Here are some interesting stats for you.

Of the winning builds, we had:

1 Build -> 62 submissions
1 Build -> 51 submissions
1 Build -> 9 submissions
1 Build -> 5 submissions
3 Builds -> 4 submissions
2 Builds -> 3 submissions
8 Builds -> 2 submissions
23 Builds -> 1 submission

So this means that more than half of the winning builds were not submitted by anyone else. This is out of over 30 000 submissions.

I kind of agree with Inde and hope that only a tiny minority of the people that submitted the 30k builds are here. I guess that the people at Anet who made the final selection could really help "the community" if they explained a bit what happened.

This thread (I tried to read most) reminds me of one section of Linsey's August 28 devnote:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:...urdock/Journal
EDIT: ReTweet from GWO:

Of course half of them are unique, I'm guaranteeing a lot of them didn't even have elites,not the whole GW populous is on here, there are a bunch of random PuGs that submitted their super Healing breeze bar. So that means somewhere around 1/2 and less were duplicates.

If the hench are terrible and useless its a good thing. I dont like the idea of a Magebane bot at stand though. Interrupts should not be on any AI controlled character imo.

Its kinda funny. They failed SOOO hard on selecting useable hench bars they broke through the basement floor and went into negative fail thus producing some accidental win.

Thanks for the feedback, its always interesting to read the statiscial data. Like I mentioned to you before Regina... I miss the GvG Final Skill usage break down on the GW site.

Just for the sake of curiosity, what were those two builds? EviShock I assume is one since its been around for god knows how long.

WOW, seriously? That can be taken one of two ways... considering the fact that half of the bars that won are meta, either...

A.) Those 23 People were smarter then all of us
B.) Other people were following a phantom "must be creative and not overally used bar" rule.

Not sure how to answer my own question TBH...

Interesting indeed Regina. But people will argue that PvX builds didn't get submitted much (and got rewarded) or that trully original ones didn't get rewarded, given that we have no idea which build is which in these statistics (it can actually support the opposite theory, since "original" ideas would be submitted more due to the originality rule). Unless they're told how builds were selected, which I guess is a pretty complex thing to do.

Why would you put emphasis on the playerbase having a good understanding of what's effective and what's not and then play up that the winning builds have originality for only being submitted by a few players?

If the playerbase really understood what was effective and what wasn't, wouldn't that mean that the builds that have honest potential would be ones that many players have submitted, due to a consensus on how the game is best played?

Also, someone please point out to me the statement that appeared anywhere before this contest's close that says anything about Hero AI being adjusted to fit builds. I'm going to bet that many players trying to take this contest seriously made an effort to use skills and bars that suited the current Hero AI, rather than rely on the AI to be adjusted to fit the build. Had something been mentioned about that, I'm sure that the input for and outcome of this contest would have been considerably different.

This is exactly why the 'originality rule' failed, along with the whole competition. ANet are merely rewarding people for copypasting off pvx, which is pretty silly. Instead of going through 30,000 submissions, they could have simply went on pvx and copied popular builds, which is what the winners builds are.

While this is very true, what was the point of having the originality rule, when the majority of winning builds were copied from pvx? Everyone was under the assumption that builds copied from wiki wouldn't win (because the rules stated that the build couldn't be taken from another source). Thousands of people posted more original builds, while others ignored the rules and copied directly off pvx. So, who are the winners? The ones who ignored the rules and copied their builds. Now, I'm not mad that the builds that one aren't original, because effectiveness > originality. Although I do find it pretty dumb that you're rewarding players who ignored the rules and copied their builds.

Do you want to know why so little people posted the winning builds? Because the majority of people who submitted a build didn't copy off pvx, since it was against the rules.

Sorry but this as a simplye guideline to players.


THERE ARE THE OFICIAL RULES FROM www.guildwars.com, something that ALL players and arena.net have to follow if they are serius.

http://uk.guildwars.com/events/contests/henchbar/



Well, now you said that the winners have to sign a contrat of "originality" where they said that they thought the builds.

Sorry Regina, but this dont convert the winners build in original builds, they dont keep the rules and Arena.net know it, but Arena.net instead recognize his error with the choice of builds and keep her own rules, make sign a contract and voila, there a " SUPER ORIGINAL BUILD" even that arena.net and the winner knows that is false.


Now have a question, if i submit a artwork of GW, and only me submited, will i be the winner ?? Is perfect, is copied but ONLY ME submit, thats convert in original art , and i can sign a "originality contract" ^^.



Best original hallowen artwork ever.

Because no one in their right mind would run that cripshot bar, the GvG version of the LC bar or the Migraine bar (please explain how the atts are going to work on that). Or instead of the Me/Rt VoR bar pre-resolve nerf, it was changed to Me/D instead with one skill change. Or the LS bar that has two changes in Remove Hex and Gift of Health (?!?!) instead of veil and aura. Is that how you see them as unique and different?

Okay, this is just sad. Regina, no one submitted these builds because they decided to follow the rules of the contest. They decided to not copy from pvx. They were the good people who actually worked to come up with builds, and yet you reward breaking the rules of the contest. I don't care if 23 were only submitted once, that means that that person decided to use that optional listed on that pvx build.

Granted, Some are unique. But I've checked and found largely more than half of the bars to be exact pvxwiki builds, with 1 or 2 skill changes, or one of the variations of such.

Like I said before, they were unique because those were the people that decided to not follow the rules, which was to be unique, and to have something effective that isn't the current meta.

It won't be very long before these henchmen are completely despised for there horrible builds, complete with frenzy and primal rage, along with others, while good and lasting builds could have won.

Good job, Anet. You've really succeeded in pissing off 98% of the community, I'd say it's a new record.

Here is the "originality rule":
http://www.guildwars.com/events/cont...test/rules.php
It seems to me like an IP thing rather than a "please find new builds, not the ones from the meta" one, which is something Anet is keen on doing, see wiki.

I suspect you're 95.43% wrong!

Thanks for supporting my point, I guess.

The point I'm trying to make is simple. ANet said the submissions couldn't be taken from another source (read: pvxwiki). As Regina clearly showed, the majority of people who submitted builds didn't copy off wiki. Now, the majority of winning builds were clearly copied off pvxwiki (read: taken from another source, against the rules). So people who followed the rules got nothing, while people who ignored the rules won.

I'm not, although the text clearly does.

EDIT: stop modifying your posts :P

So, how many of those 40 winners that'll declare they have "obeyed the rules of the contest" will not be receiving their prizes...based on the above? I'll wager they all will still get them.

Oh /facepalm! We were supposed to follow the guidelines and not the official rules???

Please do explain exactly what part of your own official rules you do not understand...and try not to sugarcoat your answer.

QFT.

I think at this point we are repeating ourselves... and we are beating a dead horse... because most of what is being said the past 3 pages was said on page 1 and 2. Lets wait for ANET to tell us why they allowed the rules to be broken and we will go from there... because this thread is not going to go much of anywhere till then...

This begs the question, "How do you plan to enforce this?"

This doesn't alter the fact that you could have gotten identical versions of most of the winning bars by cut-and-paste from PvX. Nor does it alter the fact that the current AI is painfully unequipped to run many of those bars, or the fact that about a quarter of the bars are laughably bad.

What's clear is that the judging criterion failed. People that are unfamiliar with the flaws in the game's AI selected the winning bars. Updating the AI to address these flaws would be a herculean task. You may claim that the dev team will update the AI all you want, but going to a bimonthly balance schedule suggests that the dev team lacks the time to do so.

What is equally clear is that you invested a lot of effort generating poor quality outputs. It's not that we don't appreciate the effort. It's that we prefer that your efforts produce observable, positive results in the game.

That didn't happen with this contest. This is why people are upset.

Gratz on the event.

OP, got a name for your henc-spawn yet? -Boy or a girl..?

They won't have to, until someone sues them. Then it's the winner's word against public opinion? But I'm no lawyer...

What if the implementability of AI changes was one of the main criterion of build selection? There's the new designer Robert working with Linsey now, and when SD will be finished, I bet they'll have time to tackle another big task (although they said they'd be ready to do more littles ones).

I'm hoping that a word from Linsey, Izzy or whoever was on the panel could end this discussion.

The great thing about copyright law is, you don't have to imitate something exactly. As long as the duplicate product is so similar as that it could reasonably cause confusion in the general public about which is the original and which is the copy, then it could be a copyright issue. Thus, the public opinion IS a criteria in whether or not something is original. If we don't think it is original... it isn't.

(^ above is very oversimplified and I'm am a law student, not a patent lawyer)

I think pansy malfoy already said that s/he didn't copied his/her build. And then one can argue that some of these builds are so much the "consequence" of the meta that many people can create them without knowing PvX.

After the PvE change to Mantra of Resolve a few weeks ago (1?), I toyed with my builds and I'm fairly sure I ended up with one or two that could be on PvX. Yet I didn't look at PvX.

It's unfair to blame Anet for the existence of PvX and systematically claiming that "if it's on PvX, then the guy who submitted the build HAD to know it was there". But what I'm mainly saying is that we're arguing on a legal point, but we're not lawyers.

(side note: this contest seems, like Inde said, a nicer way to interact with the community than having to come on thread like these; I guess many people don't have the kind of issues that some people have here)

Pretty horrible results from this contest, lets just drop it. There is nothing more to be said here. Perhaps its better just to leave the game alone and stop frustrating people.

I seriously don't think the pvxwiki thing is a problem. There's so much crap posted on there, you're bound to have a similar build, whether its 4 skills, 6 skills or all 8 skills, it's all been seen before (even if you're borat).

The biggest problem I feel, is that many of the builds do not work with the current AI. I encourage you too try some of these bars in any sort of pvp format. Some will be mediocre with a few useless skills, some will be utterly useless, some will be a detriment to your team.

I spent a few hours testing, so it's no harm done to me. However, I know people that spent days thinking and testing builds. Heck, those HB lovers have spent years becoming intimate with the AI - I don't think any of them won. But anyone that plays HA or GvG is familiar with heroes and what kind of bars and skills they are effective with in PvP, and what needs to be micro'd. As someone else said, I looked forward to seeing the creative builds people came up with under the limitations of the AI. Most of these builds show none of that. Its a bunch of semi-decent player bars, but shite AI bars. I would take the fighter henchmen over any of these.

And in case you think I'm biased because of my submissions, I put in about 30 para bars only and didn't win. But the para bars look fine imo. You really can't make a strong para henchmen/hero. The only time I've seen a para hero taken into pvp is for a weird arcane echo, arcane mimicry SF spike. So those are some of the only ones in my opinion that deserve to win.

I heard wasabi put up 20k ectos for one of these 20 winners to name the henchie after him. lolduping

I know that you're not allowed to tell us anything as always, Regina, but this is the first time that EVERYBODY (Read: your entire community, not just on guru) is agreeing that you guys really f-ed up big time. Your weak responses don't help your case, either. And why isn't anyone from the Live Team, the judges themselves, saying anything?

Gratz Malfoy! I would be excited too, I never win anything either LOL

This to me is something people should read. Yes the whole originality rules were awful. People should feel sick about it.

But I think the bigger concern is this:

Anet doesn't seem to know how their game works....certainly not as much as the players do anyways. Wouldn't they KNOW that half of these builds to not work properly under current AI? Why would the devs say that these builds are effective and work for the game?

Thank you. This...here on guru really has dissolved into a mess. I wish it weren't the case.

The info on hench and tonic was just sent out, so now it's time to brainstorm on a name :P

Its already been posted but:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior

*Heroes do not seem to use Falling Lotus Strike or Falling Spider on their own.

*Heroes will not use Rage of the Ntouka, "Coward!", or Deadly Paradox.

And this isn't just improper use (like they will do with everything else such as using hammer bash as soon as they get adrenaline and never even get magehunter or dev hammer charged), they flat out don't use those skills.

Forgot to say this before, Grats to Malfoy and all other winners, must be exciting being immortalized into Guild Wars : D.

It clearly wasn't. Unless you think that wiki Primal, Evis, and LC showed up because teaching the AI to Frenzy cancel and use Earth snares appropriately are easy tasks.

Consider the Frenzy cancel task. You have to teach the game to discriminate between meaningless, small damage packets and severe threats. Otherwise, a midline caster wands the hench when Frenzy/Primal goes up, the AI cancels, and the skill is wasted.

You also have to teach it to anticipate getting blown up, rather than using the cancel reactively. Otherwise you can easily spike it out with large damage packets. If you knew you could make it consistently eat a 200 point Eviscerate, why wouldn't you? That's big pressure for a backline to handle.

Credit where credit is due; for instance, the substitution of Remove Hex for Veil and SH for SoA in meta Life Sheath is sensible. There are viable bars. But most of them include skills that the AI is ill-equipped to handle, and they're almost all distinct problems that do not overlap.

Others have pointed out that the AI simply will not use many of the skills in these builds, or will do stupid things like drain its adrenaline with Hammer Bash rather than chain quarterknocks properly.

^Like others have said, this "contest" was more or less the same thing as winning the lottery.

I'd think Anet would have had a better process that what they did. For example:

-delete all builds that don't have 8 skills
-delete all buids with no elite skill
-delete builds where the elite skill does not belong to the primary profession
-delete the most popular 40 or so builds from PvX wiki
-delete all builds containing skills that AI is unable to use, or unable to use well (falling spider, weapon spells?, etc...)
-delete builds that have useless, or replacements that are better (Smiters Boon, Disrupting Shot, etc...)
-delete builds that have skills that require skill to play, or can damage the user worse than benefit them (Frenzy, doylak signet, illusion of pain, etc...)

So, hopefully, that would weed out the thousands of entries to maybe a hundred per slot. Much more managable, and you would have avoided the catastroRED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO that happened here.

1st point Lol, so you eliminate any fast casting and plenty of great dual prof builds, expel rits for instance.

2nd point, good.

3rd point, dshot bad on a hero....? Ghostly hero is better than most of my rangers. Unless you mean it as a replacement.

4th, sure.

so, please, DONT open a contest, go on wiki and that's all. You will have your wiki builds and we will have our time safe.

edit: 23 wiki builds with a skill random to make them original

To Regina;

Stop waffling and start learning from your failures. The bars are part of the metagame for players. For you to give Make Haste and Song of Concentration to a hero shows you didn't have a clue what you were doing. There are two problems with this. Firstly, these skills aren't original - every team in tombs has them because Song lets the ghost cap without fail and Make Haste lets any person on your team run relics quickly. It's not like whoever submitted them sat there and thought long and hard about the skill selection - they just copypasted the build that players use into a henchman skill bar contest. Secondly, you plan to waste untold hours tweaking AI to make them competent with their new skillbars.

Why did you remove heroes? Oh, right, because heroes running 1. interrupts, 2. enchantment removal, or 3. hexes are always going to be broken. If you replace heroes with henchmen that do exactly the same thing, you are doing a lot of work for absolutely no gain. Your 30,000 submissions you looked through? That was a waste of your time, and pretending otherwise is fooling nobody, least of all me. For a live team that doesn't have very many people, you should be looking for ways to improve the game that don't take much effort, not looking for ways to waste countless hours sorting through builds you could have found on PvX in minutes and not actually making an improvement in the game at all.

Let me reiterate - you are removing heroes because they are breaking the game, and PvPers have been screaming for their removal for years now. You finally get the idea that heroes are breaking the game, yet you still have no clue why that is. Instead of just removing them and making PvPers happy, you have to screw it up somehow. Whatever. I can bargain. However, putting henchmen in with meta gimmick bars after saying not to submit meta gimmick bars is trash.

The contest debacle irks me, I won't lie. Your behavior and response to the community, however, is absolutely unacceptable. Your company failed. You can lie to deny it (as you've done) and you can blame the community (as you've done). However, let me point this out - your company failed. You took an idea - henchmen bars - and forgot the entire reason you were putting henchmen into the game to begin with.

It's your job to communicate with us, but instead you've mocked us. We've linked you your rules from your website and you called us wrong. As a poster earlier said, what the hell are we supposed to do? Follow your official rules posted on your official website or follow guidelines posted in forums that most people don't even read? Seriously, cut out the crap. Stop lying. Stop beating around the bush. Stop acting like any of this is our fault. Your rules were shit. You didn't follow them in any case. Instead of saying "I'm sorry, even though 30/40 of our hero builds were direct PvX copies and that was in violation of the rules, we really felt that it would benefit the game more to have these bars anyway" you said "oh, we didn't actually say that was a rule" and try to link to a bunch of guideline BS as if that makes your failure any more acceptable. But guess what? I can do that to you, too, Aside from the links to your official rules which people tried to follow and were subsequently punished for doing so, your people said that you would most likely not accept gimmick builds. Except that was a blatant lie. 16 out of 20 of the GvG builds are meta gimmicks, or were in the very recent past. 14 of 20 HA builds are meta gimmicks, or were in the very recent past. I don't care what you say about anything else, or what you try to blame on the community, Martin lied to us, as did your official rules page.

Like I said, you can come back after the fact and say that we didn't understand what you wanted, and that it was our fault that we didn't read your mind and submit only meta gimmick player builds, but you'd be lying to us. Again.


That's the first bit of my post. Your contest was poorly designed, poorly communicated, and several failures on ArenaNet's side occurred that you haven't admitted to yet. You probably never will, just as you didn't when you screwed up the July 08 mAT, so I'm not even going to hold out for an apology, even though that's sort of your job.

I'm concerned about where you're going from here. You just lied to us about your contest rules, took meta gimmick builds for players regardless of what your original aims were, and grabbed a bunch of basically piece of shit bars and decided you're going to make them henchmen bars. To start, that's a bad idea. Your coders can't make a henchman, incapable of being separately flagged or locked on to a target, snare relic runners in HA with grasping earth and ward against foes. You are not going to be able to do it, plain and simple. So why did you bother accepting that bar? Do you think you're going to fix a bunch of the AI problems now, even though you haven't been able to in four years? Are you really going to go forward and put these bars in the game, even though players who have a clue about PvP are telling you that it is a very bad idea?

Let's go over your logic for all of this from the beginning. You have (finally) opted to remove heroes from PvP because they break the game. You still need something for players to use in case they lack people, so you wanted to add henchmen in the filler slots instead of just leaving those players out to dry. Henchmen in the past, however, have been bad and never taken - so you wanted to make sure your new ones would be more viable.

There are now two flaws between your original logic and what you've done. Firstly, you took player bars and pretended henchmen can use them well. You're kidding yourselves. Henchmen will never run the majority of those builds remotely well. I've seen your company's work for 4 years now, and I'm pretty safely going to assume that most of the AI tweaks will be minor, and that henchmen will remain incapable of bodyblocking a target or snaring a relic runner (or putting song of concentration up for the ghost to cap, or putting make haste on a runner when he needs it...)

Secondly, Martin claimed that you were looking for "robust, general purpose builds, not some niche meta builds or builds that will not be immediately made obsolete by meta shifts." You then did exactly the opposite of what you said (again). The majority of the builds you picked are from the meta right now. In two months or four months or whenever you manage to do another skill balance (so more like ten months), half of these skills will no longer be in the meta. Because you chose skill bars out of the meta as it stands, they will not last even one meta change, let alone several. Unless you plan to update the skills on the bars with each meta change (which doesn't seem like your plan), the henchmen will fall out of use, because you did a terrible job at picking robust, general purpose builds - you just grabbed whatever gimmicky bullshit exists right now on obs.

Those are your two major problems, and you haven't even put these henchmen in the game yet, you've just talked about it.

I highly recommend you do another little team meeting and take with you a dose of reality. Your idea will not work if you plan to implement these bars as they stand right now. You have already wasted countless hours sorting through bars needlessly, but you will waste countless more if you implement these bars and they fail as hard as I'm predicting they will.

Re-think this entire project. Hand out your prizes and assuage people's feelings, but for the sake of whatever's left in PvP, do not put these henchmen in the game.

isn't my point clear enough ?

people have been using heroes for things they were good at and the ability to control them...
all you get here is a warrior dumber than anyone you could pick up in spamadan ad1, what's the point of having them in game ?

no tease, no tainted flesh, no searing flames... anet doesn't even understand how their own AI works

thanks Auron, i'm italian and i can't speak as well as you. I totally agree with your post.