Costume brawl 2010

I wasn't playing at dead hours. Last year CB was enjoyable for non-syncers only first 2-3 days (I've made almost 2k points in this time). After that, the rest of the week the game was full of syncers. Hell, you could even go to International district and every 2-3 minutes you could see in all chat: "3..2..1...Go"

ROFL the syncing problem is fixed , but the arena isn't made permanent and the system isn't applied to RA.... PATHETIC

gg new system! No syncers finaly^^ Do it for ra.

with a remake gladiator point distribution :P
in any case this is only an event to test opinion and look how things go.

I for one welcome this syncing fix, as long as points distribution changes appropriately

Please keep discussion of syncing as pertains to Random Arenas to Sardelac.

Those who are enjoying the new format of having completely random teams each game either don't play CB much or will complain by the end of the event.

Who wants to get into a good team just to have it replaced by a completely worthless team the next game? Sure there are no more syncers to make you lose, but do you win more with random teams? And if you don't care about winning in the first place, why do you care that there are syncers or not?

GG Anet, I sincerely hope this is limited to CB only and won't apply to other mini-games.

Just as an experiment, I'd like to see what would happen if there were two versions of CB to choose from. The current one with no syncing and no team continuation, and the old one where you could carry on with a winning team from game to game but at the risk/with the benefit of being able to face syncers/be able to sync with friends. I would dearly love to see how many and what types/ability level of people would keep playing the old sync-friendly version if the new format was there at the same time for the lower-end players (eg me!) to escape to.

We can all blame syncers. We can whine all day about it. Whatever. Syncers were and always will be a QQ by those people who got beat. But thats not the point cuz they should of fixed the coding a long time ago.

However, the other point i want to make is that this arena format is no longer fun for extended periods of time. Without the ability to form a consistent team, albeit random (or supposedly random at the beginning), the arena literally becomes jump in and play for as little or as long as your like. The problem with that with randomization of teams, it neglects team skill, team bonding and individual progression. All of those things important to team play are gone. Now its basically a free for all with alliances.

An individual is supposed to take charge and try and lead a different team every 5 minutes? Try to tell new players where to go, and rally veterans with tactics? Your joking right? Sure we have the minimap and team chat. But your honestly going to tell me thats a viable replacement for consistent teams and skill. No thank you. If I'm going to sit down and play for 3-4 hours like I did ever day during last halloween event, I don't want to have to explain the rules, repeatedly call out tactics, and come up with new tactics every time i get into the match. If your team couldn't win the first match in CB without mass calling tactics, it wasn't a team worth sticking around. If you won, then you started coordinating players, and coming up with tactics.

If you were good, you could lead teams and even teach them how to win given your teams setup as you progressed through on your win streak. Now instead of having any ability of carrying your team or teaching bad kids how to play, your stuck with playing with bad kids 24/7.

And for those of you saying, "if you are really that good you can win 5v4". No. No you can't. It only takes one bad kid, running in and dying every time to lose the game for you. Even if you say that he rage quits and leaves, making it a 5v4. You should never win. NEVER. CB rewards kills. 5v4, the 5 will always win in CB. Even assuming everyone 1v1s. There leaves on guy to double up on another player. Factor in the immense amounts of defense and lack of serious damange, you can trade kills for the win. Trying to out cap a 5 man team with 4 people??? Yea right. Basically the 4 player team should never break seed. In order for that to happen the other team would have to have more bad players than the other team.

That's it. Its no longer a battle of who's better. Its who has the least amount of bad players, wins.

As for the point change. Its not 15. its clearly ten. And the point change is only advantageous to bad players who win less often. Good players who are used to consecutive wins are actually punished in the longer term by winning consecutively. The break point is game 15 (assuming you get 15 points i was getting 10 earlier) If you consistently had streaks longer than 15 in the old format, you lose points in this system. Additionally, if you factor in that a streak of 15 was quicker than winning 15 games in the current random format, you are losing even more points.


Moral of this story: CB is no longer fun for any prolonged amount of playing time, and the arena no longer rewards you for having team skill and success any more.

i completely disagree. before it was which guild was better at CB with occasional player who is playing the game like it is supposed to be played getting raped.
now its much more fun and on every game i get 3-6 cons wins which happened rarely be4.
i guess you will just have to learn to play the game without your guildies
kudos to anet

Then you just must be very bad. sry. And all the good ppl r pulling you now through the game. Because the Update only changed everything to random, skillz and tactics dnt count anymore. Just Luck.

And srsly its annoying to know u r winning the game not because of your skillz and tactics but becauze of luck.

Btw: I am Skillz r7 and i think i can say i am pretty good @ cB without any hubris. I never synced cB, not even once. Anyway i did nearly always 20-60 wins in a row last year, now iam happy about 7. And now tell me again its fairer...you always can beat syncers but you cant beat the pure luck.

Want an invite to my guild or our vent info? Trust me I'm not a syncer. I'm in a decrepit HA guild with maybe 5 active members, who only stick together because we are all friends. Daily, usually only 3 of us play. Even them the other two are usually farming something. Also the fact they don't care for CB.

I won my matches by playing well. And through brute force of playing with bad kids, finding good ones, and forming team tactics and progression as your team won more and more. 4k gamer points last year, and not one from syncing. Instead i played the game. Taught bad kids how to be not so bad, or at least yelled at them enough so I could continue our win streak.

I beat syncer's and lost to syncers. Usually we lost to the nasty asian sync, with ungodly like spikes. On average I'd say I saw about one or two sync teams a day. Almost all of those were in the wwweeeeee dead hours of the morning. 2am EST and later.

My average conseqs was easily 5-10. That was playing 10 wins, playing 1-5 more matches, finding a good team, winning 10 times and repeat. Where i used to win more matches than I lost, now i lose more because of the lack of team play.


Type QQ at me all you want. Yes i'm bitching. BECAUSE ANET BORKED CB. I feel I have a valid complaint.

A team oriented game with no sense of team cohesion???? Who the RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO would want to play that.

Sounds like a ton of QQ from the sync'ers to me: "I keep getting stuck with bad players." "CB is full of idiots who don't know how to play!" "How am I supposed to win when I keep getting stuck with scrubs?"

Boo hoo! If there's so many poor players, wouldn't being a skilled player tip the scales in your teams favor? I guess there aren't any bad CBers on the opposing teams.

sounds like alot of ppl deliberately not read into any of the arguments put forth and just made up a false representation just to discredit whoever they dont agree with. kind of sad lol

What, because NONE of them actually has any options? It's just a 123 spam. 3 dots vs 2 dots, we win, 3 dots vs 3 dots, who has more shrines.
There's barely any form of difficulty in execution these bars.

Had some good times CB'ing last night. Sin and War bars are very good, effective and fun to play. Ele bar, so so. Dont have a monk or rit to play, so I will not speak about'em. Tonight I will experiment the others: Ranger, Necro and Para.

Mesmer bar? terrible. I saw a lot of ragequitting 'cos of it.

You said it!

- Well you all saying we r just QQ'in Syncerz:
Syncing is still possible, you just have to Sync for every single Round again and again. And Believe me most Gamer Guilds declared Anet the War now, and thats why they doing so all the time, just in defiance. Events before, Syncers and all other players were doing CB, cauze of the great fun, now everyone is doing it just because of the points.

And srsly is here anyone playing a game for work? Shouldnt we play cauze of the Fun?! Could that rly be the thing CB is existing for?!...well done. Gj.

Most of what I can see is either:

I dislike CB b/c I cannot continuosly roll teams.

I like CB b/c it is now random.

Although it's sad once you find that good team to only have it broken up the next match, I find this year more balanced. (well mesmer bar...no comment) I find now that it is more about individual skill vs team skill, so one needs to step up their game if they find that they are losing a lot.

Last year necro was awesome when played correctly and kept an eye on the energy flow.

The most PvP-mesmery build CB ever had.


If you're bored with it, play a mesmer. If you like it, keep on playing whatever you like and spam 123.
Simple enough.

Way to punish non syncers that manage to get a good group just because a few people sync.

Getting consecutive wins isnt possible anymore. I enjoy being able to get up to 25 consec wins in the same RANDOM group when we all play well together.

Ok, now i seriously wonder why people don't like it.

CoF and SoF are well-round AoE interrupts with some armor-ignoring damage. Can't see anything wrong with it.
Energy Burn is a part of e-denial way you can run with this build, dishing out some damage, so that 100% PvE mesmers aren't THAT annoyed for not seeing too many floating numbers.
Shatter Enchantment - ench removal on a mes, GORE GORE GOR... oh, wait... While i agree shatter is too expensive both energy- and recharge-wise, i always though that enchantment removal was useful?
Waste Not, Want Not - cheap and nice way to keep your energy high so that you can spam shit on recharge. It's veeeery easy to use it.
Ether Feast - one of the best self-heals in game with minimal point and skill investment + energy denial. And when echoed, with little luck on recharges you can spam EF all the freakin' time, making you quite indestructible for the moment (especially in 1v1 situations) and effectively burning the enemy's energy. One thing i don't like here - other builds' skills are cheap, almost all cost 5e, some of them 10e, making e-denial - even echoed - less viable. If it was changed, forcing other casters to keep an eye on their energy and maintain it wisely, the mesmer would be able to 1v1 own most of them.
Calculated Risk - that's the one i agree on, it sucks hard. Empathy would be MUCH better. Most of other physical shutdown skills would be much better. Even some nice degen would be better in CR's place.

So, that's what - one skill that sucks balls with the others proving to be useful if used wisely. And even CR, if you're extremely lucky, can not only shutdown, but also keep damaging a physical for 8 seconds.

I find the current build more suiting PvP mesmer than last year's, full of degen, or 2008 Overload spam - it's versatile and lets you survive for quite long unless you get knocked down or simply mobbed.



added: if the fast changes (as in: over the weekend) are possible - and i would highly advise so, as even though they may be less thought-through and more imbalanced than the current ones, you know have the actual in-game experience of them and lot of responses already; the second thing in for fast changes is that it's the last Halloween before GW2 - if they are possible, i'd change CR for another melee-hate skill (even Wandering Eye would be better, though Empathy would be the best option AND would provide the most-recognised mesmer skill in game) and Energy Burn for another hate - Wastrel's Worry, or Power Lock. Also, Drain Enchantment/Inspired Enchantment > Shatter Enchantment.
Other than that, the mesmer bar for Costume Brawl is perfect.

Love the concept of team changes, although perhaps it should switch people after 3 games instead of 1. Brings real parity to the format; encouraging better players to be more effective to win, and making newer players think they have enough chance at pvp to try more often. On the other hand, it also demonstrates that some people only celebrated the format for it's bottom-feeding capacity. But if you think about it, the difficulty ranges towards being very high, seeing how: you have 10 days to learn builds, you rapidly have to learn your team skill/listening levels, you rapidly have to learn your opponent build/skill level, and everyone individually has to decide when to cap, defend, retreat, split, and collapse.

Artificially induced parity is good for creating rivalry where one may not actually exist. To me, the fun of casual pvp has always been about stepping into an impossible situation and managing to pull off a win, or being a new player and having better players on your own team to inspire you to learn how to play the game. Anyone who wants guarantees does not belong in casual pvp, because competition is supposed to tweak the playing field that you face. Sure, we all want to play with our 'friends'; all those 'friendly' people who happen to win games for us, use good tactics, and who we coordinate 'chat' with over talk programs.

I played a necro yesterday, so I did alot of hovering around stronger classes for protection, and felt weak when anyone who knew how to heal was around (low burst output). And now a few basic things about necros: People figured out when to use conditions to not to get their important ones foul feast/plague sent back to teammates. People started to figure out that burst damage reduces what a health-saccing character with no speed boost can do. Ravenous Gaze does not feel like an elite when you consider the importance of avoiding burst damage and providing focus fire in the format. Why would a necro build forgo any enchant hate on his bar. And taking 11 Soul Reaping so I only have 12 in Blood Magic is for what again?

yes i must be getting awesome random teams in 80% of cases and while i go rambo they go and win for me...
i don't get it if you are that good why cant you win with random teams,if they are so bad you got 4 bad players+1 awesome(you) and the other team got 5 bad so i don't see your problem...
btw r7 skills doesn't necessarily mean you are that good it just means that you played a lot... but either way it is still impressive
gg

Not necessarily y, but believe me i am

That's why.

After reading that....this is what I got from it.....You used to synch to build the strength of your team over the coarse of time.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but how is that not cheating?

Meh...sword warrior
I'm not complaining, but sword is just...urgh >_<
seems like rit is the most fun build to play just like last year

i hoenstly love the mes build, it seams the strongest for spliting cause i can solo any class with a mesmer atm

exactly lol

@exotremo
you are way overreacting none of that happened to me except an occasional dial-up or smt that never connects or connects too late

Doh, Nope -.-"

I used random teams to build the strength of your team over the coarse of time.
See, synced teams rly dont need any time to build up a decent teamwork...they work perfectly together right from the moment they've entered :S

Lolz, how? Every class has access to self-heal skill and mes just can't do enough damage. It's generally useless this year.

Yea. What do you kite the vamp sword warrior to death to kill it??? You simply can't put out enough damage to come close to kill something. Wanding does more dps on the Mesmer bar than its skills. Except for possibly calculated risk, but that skill is terrible.

Its not a terrible bar. Its just terrible in the CB format. You're gimping your team from the start by playing a pure support character. You want as much offense and you can with just enough defense to survive. You can run around in circles all day long, but you won't kill anything as the mesmer.

I'm really liking this rit bar. Perfect amount of healing and damage.

Still sucks, this new format. But Costume Brawl is still extremely fun. Hard to resist.

Hard to resist? Last year, yes, this year, no.

Last years, the entire point of CB was that you go in, get a bad team 2-3 times with random noobs and after going in 5 times, you finally get a team with 2-3 players that know what they are doing. You socialize with them, you discuss tactics and have a great time, because you play a good, tactital game with a nice chance that you will win. This year, you meet the same idiots as last year, but the flaw is that after you finally get that decent, enjoyable team, it gets disbanded after one game and you are back with the same morons you are so trying to avoid. Every game turns into a giant mobfest with nearly no tactic involved, because teams get no chance to play together for more then one game. Because of this, bad players do not get the chance to learn from the better players, because they don't get the time to explain what they are doing wrong, because there are no teams anymore, but just 5 random players that disband after the game is over.

It is such a shame that ANET turned this tactical, enjoyable, TEAMgame, into a giant free-for-all brainless mobfest.

Well, better luck next year I guess.....

never played CB before this halloween, awful, far worse than any RA i've seen, worse than AB and the like, seems like most people i've played with like to run on their own into larger groups, with predictable results, as far as i've seen there just appears to be not much common sense in CB

it's quickly become very tedious

Echoded EF provides more healing than ANY other class has. Ench removal proves disrupting for enchantment-relying classes - bye Healing Breeze, bye Air Attunement, bye Shadow Refuge, bye Blood Renewal. If you can time your interrupts well, you can own pretty much everyone in 1v1 now.

This year it seems the best bet is just dont split.
mob up and kill stragglers.
splitting is suicide when a 5 man mob is running around on the other side

If they mob, you mob, or just run. Don't expect a miracle unless you are a ranger...

Having said that, the nicest classes to play to win, in MY opinion, are (in order): ranger, sin, rit, monk, war, etc. The paragon bar is pretty bad...worst than the mesmer...since some skills require party presence for max effect, lol. An average paragon simply stands NO chance against an average ranger using the bars provided.

I like the rit build.

So far that's the one I liked the most too.
It has a little of healing, some damage can remove conditions...

But what I found more useful is binding chains. I can't count how many times I've been saved from an assassin by that skill.

oh yes I am surely enjoying having things said to me....besides noob....and 'go back to pve' and yes people leaving when they find out that one of their players is new to pvp...yes and then the 'resign we lost' uhm the score is 8-2...we lost???? game is just starting (yes I have seen people come from that far behind and WIN).....yet to win another match....well I have all week to annoy people with my noobish ways I guess (am getting closer--even WITH a leaver our last group did 20-16--so its not just me that's bad)