Feedback on the Halloween Update (From a PvP perspective)

I love how Costume Brawl got reduced to "boring" in one update. Don't get me wrong, there definatly was some issues with the format, and I can see the Krewe really tried, I highly doubt there will be alot of PvP'ers (big word, more later) left playing it after this update.

Note I say PvP'ers because a large part of the PvE community venturing in PvP don't care about fun, they mostly care about rewards. On top of that, due to their lack of PvP experience, most of them wouldn't even understand what is fun and whatnot. (Similar to how peope in the 80's concidered Space Invaders etc fun.)


Syncing

Syncing is fixed, but in what manner? One of the biggest complaints of the match-up system is the large amount of terrible people playing. Now, don't get me wrong: it's a good thing syncing no longer works (I must admit I synced last year aswell), but at what cost? Imagine if syncing was weeds growing on your lawn. You've succesfully burned the weeds to the ground, but at the same time your intire lawn is reduced to a pile of ash...

Getting consecutive wins is one of the most fun parts about PvP, because it gives the feeling (illusion?) you're getting rewarded for your play. Now, it's only a matter of time before you get teamed up with 4 complete retards, and your sense of achievement goes down the shitter, because you simply can't carry an intire team. I've done enough runs last year where I didn't sync, and I got teamed up with 4 other semi-competent people. My skill was more ofte than not that little bit we needed to carry our team to victory, and my allies were good enough not to loose matches and ultimately frustrate me to death.

Now, you'dd be lucky if you get more than 3 consecutives, solely because the overal skill level of peope is so low, you might aswell Rock-Paper-Scissors. This alone is for me a reason not to play it anymore.

Instead, they should've just fixed syncing at it's core, and that's shuffling the list of entering players 2-3 seconds before going in, and then form teams out of that shuffle. They've ruined a large part of the fun in a format solely to fix a problem which could've been fixed alot easier...


Bar Changes

Then there's the bars. The main problem was, everyone agrees, the Sin bar. The Palm Strike template was simply so strong, it had no problems killing every other bar 1v1, and even being able to beat most other professions 2v1.
However, the problem never was the efficiency of the Sinbar, but rather the inefficiency of all the other bars.

The Sin bar was so strong not because it was overpowered, but because it was overal; it had healing, condition removal, survivability and killing power. Not only did this make the Sinbar the best to play, it also made it the most fun to play. Nowhere during the time you played sin, even if you died or got rolled 0-20 you got the feeling you got gimped because of your bar. Every other bar had some kind of lack to it, which made it useless in certain situations giving you that "Damn, if I would've been a sin, this would've went differently (better)".

So what should've happened is they should've brought every bar on par with the Sin's, rather than the Sin's with every other. Why? Because the Sin bar was, by far, the best and most fun/complete bar to play, similar to balancing PvP around GvG.
The Monk should've gotten RoD, Veil, some kind of prot elite (think SoR or PnH), maybe even Word of Censure. (If they wanted to go more offensive)

Every other profession in general needed more damage, warriors shoudl've gotten Heavy Blow (for Dev hammer). Rangers were relatively fine, but barbed arrows for their elite, and cripshot or melshot for one of their attacks would've made them alot more suitable. I can keep on going for just about every profession. Rather than making the Sinclass incomplete and gimped, they should've made every other class complete, or compensate lack in certain areas by extras in others.

Now we've got 8 relatively boring bars to play, or atleast for the people who know what they're doing (Just because monkeys think it's fun to play with a stick doesn't mean playing with a stick is fun) because there simply isn't much you can do if your bar is gimped. Blind as a sin? /sit for 8 seconds.

And this whole "bring down every bar to a redicilously bad level"-thing wouldn't have been so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that every bar is so straight-forward. As a Warrior, you litterely go in, and spam your shit. I mean, there really isn't many other ways of playing your bar. As an Ele, you go in and spam your shit. If you don't kill shit, too bad, nothing more you could've done.
Agreed, it's a little bit the nature of the beast (sealed deck), but when you had bars like the old Palm Strike sin, you could work around 90% of the problems you faced simply by playing differently or playing better.

Every scrimmage has now turned into a Rock-Paper-Scissor match. If you're facing an Ele 1V1 as a frontliner, you're going to loose. (Unless they somehow mess up on ashblast + Lsurge) If you face a ranger or rit or monk as an ele, you're going to loose.

Rather than giving every bar some versatile skills, they stripped all bars of all versatily. This in result turns the format in a very boring one to play, atleast for me, and every friend I've pm'ed so far to come and play some CB together. (and talk on vent for the lulz)

The bottom line here is that the balancing of the format (It's relatively balanced now with the exception of a profession or 2) came at the cost of removing the one profession which showed the format in perfection...


GvG Changes

Then there's the GvG updates: 50 bags of ToT-bags per win. I like the intiative, but once again implemented competely wrong. For starters, why would PvE'ers start GvG'ing all of a sudden? 50 ToT bags in peanuts compared to farming them, or doing CB. Given the fact that on average, you'll need 2 GvG's for one set of bags (50/50 ratio, probably even lower for PvE'ers), and an average GvG lasts about 25 minutes (including set-up, waiting time, etc).
That's 50 bags per hour, hardly worth playing for, especially when you still don't know what you're doing.

And even if PvE'ers started playing in masses all of a sudden, what's stopping them from turning this into a RR event? Anet once again mistaked promoting PvP with promoting farming. More and better rewards are good, as long as they can't be farmed. "Force" PvE'ers (so to speak) to LEARN to play better and more efficient, and reward that effort. For those who absolutely don't want to PvP, don't. (So don't give unique rewards, but don't spit in our faces either -like 50 ToT bags-)

Nontheless, for the people already GvG'ing, this is a nice bonus, but ask yourselves, is this really what the GvG scene needs? Already alliance chat (of a top 30 alliance) is getting filled with jokes as to how redicilous this really is. Surely, it's welcome free money, but this in no way makes up for the years of neglect, or gives people a feeling of "satisfaction" all of a sudden.


Final Statement

So in overal, what happened is Costume Brawl got reduced from being a fun format for both Die-Hards as the casual gamers, to a format at best playable for an hour orso, only to leave it with a taste of sentiment to the old CB.
As for GvG, I believe hardly anything will change for both the GvG or the non-GvG community. Rewards aren't high enough to lure people, and if they were they'dd be given for the wrong reasons. Getting more people to PvP is psychology more than good game balance or other attributes.
You got to get people to want to GvG, rather than to want to farm the rewars for GvG, and I believe this update failed miserably at that.

I can see, and feel, Anet is trying to reach out. But it's FAR to little, maybe not too late. Anet, and apparently the Test Krewe, still has alot to learn as to fixing the problem rather than the symptoms. A good effort, but I can not see me enjoying this Haloween more than I would've any other week, aside from the "free" ToT bags I occasionaly get...

Regarding the GvG presents, this is just a test for future implementation. Hopefully, we might see something better there.

I don't play CB at all, so I won't comment on the skill bars there. However, shuffling teams every CB game is a pretty depressing last resort to fixing syncing.

And I love it how you reduced your entire argument into a poorly stated opinion with a single sentence.

You wrote all that about a once a year gimmick mini arena? I mean consider that when you think how much time they really have to spend on making it something amazing... it's just a week long activity.

Agree with this. All of this nonsense for an event that only happens once a year. Seriously? Maybe you have something better to do no?

Very true on the whole. The simple fact is that the only frontliner in this CB format thats decent is the derv. Paras like always are pretty gimped. Rangers, Rits, Monks, and Eles are decently strong. Mes are nice, but not enough offence power themselves, its all focused on what the others are doing, that and its all reactive not proactive. Necros are a joke.

Here's my 2 cents regarding CB:

syncing fix - all the same for me, didn't sync before, can't sync now
mesmer bar - lots of fun echo-ing stuff, but i HATE waste not, want not. needs moar pdrain/leech sig
new map - pretty but not interesting to play
format - getting teamed with new random ppl every round, win or loose, is not fun

overall - it's still bad

This.

"Good Players" don't get to tell everyone else what is fun. If 5 or 10 times the number of people play CB for an hour each day, while the sync pros quit, mission accomplished.

P.S. I'm getting 3-5 consecs quite regularly.

There's a reason why the re-randomization was done with CB, but I'm not sure if I have the liberty to say.

As to the Build Changes - they were made to be balanced so that each build has its own niche, and in turn is strong against some professions while weak against others. We spent a lot of time to get it feeling right, because it is simply impossible to have every build able to use everything. Why was last year's sin build so fun to play? Because it had everything necessary. That is what made it too strong and not every profession can mimic this.

I have no comment on the GvG stuff since I hardly ever GvG.

I prefer this way of playing, it's better to see too strong team pown all the teams, I play for fun and not to win (and I did GVG, HA, TA)there is more "variety" and "competitiveness" for both proplayer the must give the best to try to balance things, and for the noobs so that they understand what it means to work in teams (even if sometimes lack the base experience).
for someone is better having a pro team, but if there is 1 noob in a team with 5 pro the first don't undarstand what he do and mirror the action of other without learn (this is my expirience first time i came in pvp).
And the concept is RANDOM, more random than this can't be.

(sorry for grammar errors if any)

Wow...

Really?

Your beef about the lack of consecutive wins is a moot one. I just went in twice, and both times I got 10 win streaks (one of the streaks had to end because of an update). As far as I'm concerned, the syncing fix is fine by me.

Also, the bars, as far as I can tell, are fine. They all are non-optimal, but decent enough for the purposes of costume brawl (I personally like the ranger bar).

Agreed on both "syncing fix" and skillbars.

It's good that syncing no longer works, but the fact that I'm limited to 15 points per win is f-ing stupid.
Before if I had a good team I had an advantage over bad teams- how's that unfair? Good beats bad, simple. Instead, no R3 Skillz for me.

Skillbars- sin bar now is laughable, so is ranger bar. They definitely should work on other classes' skillbars instead of dumbing down the most powerful.
But that's ANet for you, silly half-measures all around.
In my eyes, instead of making all builds equally good, they made them equally bad.
And playing with a bad build isn't really my idea of fun.

Guys this serious! How can I get a serious streak going without syncing? GW is my second job

I'm a sad panda (ps I'm for sell 10k ecto..unded)

The most fun part about syncing is that even if people sync (be it CB, FA, JQ etc) they still fail.
Hello [KISS]

Dammit, someone ninja'd.

Yeah, the bars are fine.

It's how they fixed syncing that's the problem. The analogy from the other thread was a nice one, in an attempt to get rid of the weed on the lawn they ended up torching it all to ashes. Getting to know your teammates and adjust to each other's playstyles over consecutive battles is no longer an option. New terrible players every round, big incentive to socialize..

The playstyle that is being promoted is rushing in to get 20 quick points so you maximize points earned per hour. Getting a bad start? Start saccing so you can get back to outpost as soon as possible to try again. Capping shrines and await your enemy's next move? Screw that, not worth it! People who like to play with their brain disconnected and roll their face across the keyboard will love this new CB. Unfortunately these people seem to be today's majority so if they are having fun this way I guess the rest of us should just shut up and do something else.

For the love of god, stop resetting my skill order each game.

That doesn't describe the change at all.

I don't fully understand what you're trying to say with this. My intire point was that for PvE'ers playing Costume Brawl is playing Costume Brawl. You could throw in a lever that gives you immunity for 20 seconds, a catapult which kills everyone on the map, and whatnotelse, and the average PvE'er still wouldn't frown or ask questions, solely because they don't know how competitivity or balance works. (for PvP anyways)

If you showed a person from the 80's space invaders, he'dd be competely overwhelmed because he's never experienced anything else. If you were somehow able to take a gamer from the 80's (if they even existed back then) to the now, and showed him all the stuff we have got now, he'dd see how boring Space Invaders really is.

I mean yeah, the game's original (for it's time) and nowadays has a nostalgic value, but compared to nowaday's games (purely on the game and today's standards) only a handfull of peope would enjoy it more than 30 mintutes.

A PvE'er who has never experienced competitive PvP, doesn't know where the value lies in a competitive game or format. Like mentioned earlier, you could have him play something competely overpowered (which makes him beat every other player with the touch of a button), he'dd see nothing wrong with it because he doesn't know what it's supposed to be like.

I don't know why people go so bend over that one comparison? Are you guys all just some hard-core vintage/retro gamers or something? I didnd't mean it offensive in any way, neither towards PvE'ers nor towards Space Invaders.

If someone said I was terrible at World of Warcraft PvP, and I have no clue how WoW balance works, I'dd say he's correct because I've never played the game.

I have no idea where this hostility comes from...

@ Konig:

Yeah, maybe you could PM me the reason or something? But untill we (the community) get an explanation, you can't really blame us for asking or complaining. The solution is so obvious, yet these redicilous measures get taken which more often than not ruin the fun. (And in this case they do)
If there is a solid reason to do things this way, I'dd love to hear it. But common sense is telling me it's either one of 2 things:
- To stop people from going in during dead hours, and then play hours straight (cuz even if they manage to form a synced team, they'll be broken up the second more people start to play)

OR the more obvious one:
- Certain hacks which allow hackers to team up with whomever they want. (I've heard from reliable source this has been a possibility for a long time)

On the build changes:

I know not every profession can mimic the Palm Strike bar, but most professions would come really close. Think Hammer warrior with enraging charge, think water ele with steam, think illusion mesmer with frustration and some interrupts, etc...

There's enough tools to play around with, but instead you've (as the intire TK together) opted to push every profession in more in a RPS-box.

I've played most of the bars, and pretty much all of them have the same problem: It's either raw damage or raw defence, and each bar just counters another. On top of that, from a PvP perspective where the skill/reward ratio should matter, these bars are far from ideal.

The Rage of the Ntouka warrior for example:

The perma rush is a nice feature, but the fact that you're sword and have absolutely no form of interrupt means your intire playstyle gets reduced to C+Space => Rush => 2345. Bull's on this bar is fun (Hitting Bull's is always fun) but redundant for many ways:
-You have perma rush, and most other professions don't have a perma speedboost, so you'll kill them anyways.
-Most people don't even bother to run. (You rezz anyways, they don't know (bad ppl), ...)

I'dd rather have seen Savage Slash, and Grapple on the bar... From a playability point of view, this would make alot more sense, because you're not just playing a waiting game anymore with elementalists: "When are they going to mess up their Ash blast so I can finally hit them, zzzzz"

Every profession could've still gotten his own niche, but the common ground, the versatility and playability, should've been there. Instead, you're always in that position which I've mentioned in my first post, where you're in a certain situation, but unable to do anything about it because your bar doesn't allow you to. All you can do is sit back, and hope the enemy instead will change something about it. (Aka, RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO up)
For someone who enjoys competitive PvP (and the old CB), this is very frustrating...

All I wonder is why not every bar has been given some form of KD, interrupt or movement control (for both you or the enemy) skill, simply put versatility skill, when surely every profession has them.

Monks have RoD, Bane Signet (though they do have it), Armor ignoring damage, Buff's, Healings, Hex and Condi removals.

Rits have the channeling line, they recently got binding chains which is perfect. They shoudl've gotten anguished was lingwah and that channeling hex that gives energy aswell though.

Dervishes have featherfooth, big damage spikes, hex removal, acces to many conditions, etc...

Paragons (despite being gimped by nature) have the ability to do large ranged damage. They also have one of the best utility lines in the game: command. Brace Yourself is invaluable in formats with small-sized teams. Make Haste would provide great movement control. Barbed Spear + Maiming Spear, ...

Eles have so much utility, but instead they're given a below-par, unfun bar to play. (It's on par with all the other bars though) Why not glyph of immolation + snares and steam. Or Lighteing Javelin, Shock, Windborne, Gale, Freezing Gust, etc...

The necro bar that exists now is alright, but could've done with Weaken Knees and life siphon.

It's not like not a single bar couldn't have been improved a little bit. And my point merely was: from a PvP perspective it's more fun to play a complete bar than to play a gimped bar. And I'm pretty sure most people who played CB so far, and understand the basics of PvP balance would agree with this.

It's just not fun playing as any of the professions, because it's nothing more than: Run in, see if your profession beats his profession. If it does: engage, if it doesn't, run...