Feedback on the Halloween Update (From a PvP perspective)

So power creep is a good thing now. Good to know.

I think there is nothing wrong with Hallowen update. I'm ok with it.


Also This :


Keep repeating to yourself : "It's a holiday event, it lasts 7 days , it's supposed to be fun, it's not here for balance QQfest ..."

Also +1 for catapult

And you wonder whats with all hostility.

And you don't see any relationship between fun and balance? Come on you can do better than that.

There can never be balance. The game is changing. I find almost any change in this old game fun.

Why do very valuable threads like this degenerate into PvE vs PvP discussions. Some users made good points about how CB changed (for the worse - from their point of view) and backed them up with thoughtful reasoning. That's feedback.

There's no point in arguing about personal experiences and taste (behind made points), because feedback is always subjective.


Note: Please refrain from using phrases like "you can't judge the format as it is, because you don't see the whole picture". Many players are able to identify strengths and weaknesses, gameplay and game mechanics without much commitment or by coming from other formats/games etc.

Following Borat's train of thought is like following a tornado headed towards a radioactive volcano while drinking acid and chugging paint chips.

You just don't do it.

Anyway, back on topic, I actually played a bit of CB and found it pretty much the same. User friendly bars, better skins, and the random teams makes the format that much more unique (Imagine how broken this place would be if everyone went Necro....)

LOL I thought the same. Especially because he latter gives his odd definition of fun; which in his view is: getting rewarded.
I guess the difference he wants to stress is "material rewards vs. rewarding skillful play". A very arrogant position, which does not help at all getting his points across, which are few:

• Rock-Paper-Scissor should be on each players bar instead of divided across professions;

• Randomize players entering the cue before but not after match-ups to allow favorable teams set ups to dominate.

My advice to you dear borat would be to go and play random arenas. You might enjoy it.

Woah , yes i agree with Thevil Kind abd Killed U Man on those points. This year , costume brawl is so boring , i'm glad they didn't make it perma . Seriously , just to make a list of problems :
- All bars are terrible and not fun to play , medal for paragon and dervish ones which are completly useless
- Some skills imbalanced for some maps ( i.e rit snare which rewards 5v1 on some moments )
- The new map is a complete joke , more likely first who capped battle cry or one who has most damage wins
- Still terrible players : 4/5 of rangers dont climb on altars , 4/5 of players still suicide 1v3, 3/4 of players got no idea what they're doing
- The new system : completly pathetic , good thing is you cant sync anymore , but well then you can't have an ok team for some mins or hours...

I love the new mesmer bar with echo, way more fun then the usual gimmick builds u need to play in pvp as mesmer.

But pvp people dont seem to play for fun they just want to win.

Balance is better design, objectively speaking.

Not really fun to lose during hours because of warriors going 1v5..

This has nothing to do with power creep, it has to do with the lack of complete skill bars that take skill to play. Power creep is only bad if it's done consistently in a game that already has a good gameplay pace.

As a test for further implementation to RA for example?

lulz. 3-5 consec is terrible. Especially when you break it down into gamer points/hour and compare it to the time it took you to score the same amount last year.


No, power creep in the global balance of guildwars meta is bad. Balancing CB so that its not as stagnant and defensive as GvG was with dual DA paragons is good. However thats not what happened. They made every bar a solo survivor. Doing so sacrifices offense, and in a format where you don't have a set team, teams of 5 people all turtling on themselves and kiting in circles is not good.

The Mesmer for instance. You have: a spell interrupt, and attack interupt, Edrain+dmg, Emanagement, self heal, enchant strip, echo, and useless calculated risk because empathy would of been OP without hex removal.

This bar CAN NOT, CAN NOT kill anything. Its purely support/defense.

Lets also look at the ranger bar. You get 3 dmg skills, 1 interupt, 1 snare, 1 heal, 1 cond removal, and 1 def stance. You actually have a chance to kill something with this bar. Oh wait nevermind, every other class has a self heal and some sort of defensive skills.

I literally played a match where the first three minutes, me and a enemy kited each other in circles trying to kill each other, while the rest of our teams fought four on four. (I was also pretty baked and only hit half my rupts, but still)

That should never happen. Thats an immediate sign of too much defense.

It also doesn't help the energy pool is fixed and most caster classes find themselves with unlimited energy. Aka eles.

Theres plenty of things wrong with CB, but the number one error was introduction of randomizing teams after every win. I'd rather be kicked out of CB at 25 wins to prevent long sync streaks at dead hours to abuse the points, than having a new team every damn match.

Things

I'm loving the costume brawl. I've played sin, rit and ele and the only bar I didn't like was ele (massive energy mangement problems in prolonged fights). I love the randomised teams every time, I don't get permanently stuck with that moron warrior that keeps running off "distracting" the other team(aka getting ganked while he runs around solo like a headless chicken). Neither do I get rolled by those two uber teams that eventually form up (five skilled players that know the better strategies and stick to them) causing every team with less than five skilled players, who all know what to do, to lose and get sent back.

The strict cap on rewards means more people will play and get a decent reward and keeping that streak going doesn't feel like this hugely important thing. This update means more players will get more bags and more enjoyment out of the arena. It also means the numbers won't drop after a couple days simply because people get bored of getting wiped by those two teams and getting little to no bags.

Good job on the costume brawl.

The amount of fun is obviously measured in amount of bags now. It's the same disease you guys suffer from in pve where your idea of fun has been reduced to a progress bar on a title track. Getting people to realise how shallow this is seems as hard as telling people there is no god.

I LOL'd at Mesmer bar..

Everyone likes getting more rewards. This updates means the majority of players will get more rewards.

Again the update makes the arena more enjoyable for most players because randomly putting teams together after each battle doesn't result in uber streak teams that slaughter everyone, or even just good teams which often will. Almost every encounter you have a coin toss chance to win, after that it's up to your own skill. In the past it didn't matter if you were good if your team was a fresh average team against a streaked awesome team. This will make it more fun for more people.

Sure but well , can there be some arena fun for PvPer's too maybe ?....

Fun fact: challenge and winning is fun.

I have no problem with the skill bars. A good player can make an average bar work fine by using good tactics. The sync fixing however was done poorly. Many here have stated that much of the fun comes from getting to know your team and earning wins as a team (by learning and teaching tactics). I agree. The same thing makes RA fun.

Fun is so subjective though. For me, CB used to be fun because I could build an understanding with new players through a streak. That camaraderie / rapport really made CB stand out as you didn't need to sync to get into teams that you could form a bond with. With this you could form an understanding of who to split, when to cap and when to push for a kill. You can't build these tactics into a one off game.

The addition of the new map really has put me off as well. The larger maps give greater depth to tactics, where you can essentially out split your opponents if they choose to march around with battle cry in a mob. They could at least redesign the bonuses as a battle cry buffed mob makes it too easy to outmaneuver any counters.

For me it has lost a lot of the fun it used to have.

I don't really mind the random teams.

Although getting a good team is part of what makes RA, this is not RA. And so, since you'll get a different team, no matter how good you are, you may end up losing anyways, so what you do yourself, and your ability to quickly take over the leadership of the team if you know what's to be done count a lot more.

That way we don't get a few guys thrashing a lot of poor newbies all the time, or the newbies getting a lot of points just because they were lucky enough to get a good team. If a good newbie is smart enough to stick to the rest of the party and use some skills once in a while, they may still survive a fight. If a good player is unlucky enough to get a bunch of idiots that think that this is Jade Quarry, then he's done.

The system balances itself out, making each fight important and separate from the rest.
You just have to wait less for the next match when you win.

For me it has been good so far. I'm still having trouble with those that run around solo (I've found myself alonea couple of times, but I usually can run away on time), but if you tell them to "STICK FRAKKING TOGETHER, FOR GRENTH SAKE!" at the beginning of the match, they sometimes listen, and you don't get two idiots getting killed by two assassins backed by a necromancer for thinking they are so special they can go 2-3 and still survive when they find that the enemy went 5-0.
I found this game style rather similar to being an infected in Left 4 Dead versus.
You are bound to be more successful if you manage to attack one of them when they are alone

^this. Wins and losses in this format are more evenly distributed. It makes for a better overall experience. The fact that people are upset they can't sync or can only sync for one match is a HUGE step in the right direction. Maybe those people will go do something else now which is all good by me.

lol, i thought it was pretty obvious he was talking about RA too. Didn't seem worthy of the "i gots super secret infos" stance.

Anyway, seems to me a lot of complaints here are people not being able to form decent teams, and play together for many rounds with people they can play well together with.

So wouldn't a simple solution be to just have a seperate Team CB arena where you choose your team beforehand and fight other organised teams? That way you get challenging fights with people you know and play well with. Or do you just want to have that kind of power against random teams so you can easily roll them and bring in rewards after rewards?

Stop with the same silly argument over and over. Show me all these posts complaining about not being able to sync.

If it was in my hands, I'll make a tournament version of each of the 3 Battle Isles PvP formats. The tournament ones would be team based and give more rewards, more the higher you get, and the usual PvP formats would be random format and give less, but more consistent rewards for those that keep winning, but not as much for consecutive wins.

You know, make in tournaments getting to the top the important thing, and in random count just each battle.

Just like with most FPS I know.
When people play in tournaments, they form teams with people they trust, but when they're just playing for the sake of it, they usually hit a server they like or a random server with good ping, and play there in random teams with strangers, or with their friends.

Sure. But Anet will never add any new arena to the game at this point. And seeing how the majority is uninterested in being competitive and would rather have tot bags handed to them for rolling their face over the keyboard it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the "team version" of CB would be quite empty. Despite the competitive geared people would rather fight good teams in CB it simply lacks the playerbase, the scrubs are needed just to fill the numbers.

It has nothing to do with rewards or a want to dominate scrubs, it is almost exclusively about being able to interact with your teammates. Work out some strategy, get to know each other, have a good time in general. I'd accept negative rewards to be able to do this. If I could do a team version of CB where I could play with 2 other people only and be matched against a random team of 5 I'd take it. That's 5v3 putting me at a severe disadvantage, organised team or not. I'd also be willing to PAY instead of receive rewards after each win or kill. Every time I win a game the scrubs could get 200 gold each from my xunlai bank account. How's that for playing the game for rewards?

50/50 and play for fun?

In the old format you wouldn't be stuck with that "moron warrior" either because your team would lose. Rather, the new format ensures that you don't get to keep any of those players who do know what they are doing. In addition, you may lose the "moron warrior" but win or lose, you're have just as good of chance of getting another. As for the uber teams, the better teams is almost always going to win in either format. However, in the old format, because the number of players in CB is so large, you're unlikely to run into that uber team very often and have a good chance of forming your own.

But it's not up to just your skill to win. It up to the skill of the 9 other players there as well and they carry a lot more weight. Since random teams are formed for each match, there's no tactics and no incentive to improve. It's just the luck of the draw each time. The current costume brawl is just a coin toss with a brief show in between.

I read the OP's first paragraph....

That's all I needed to validate skipping the rest. This is your elitist PvPer. This is why they have no real place in GW and why PvP is a dead format, other than a small dark corner where they can beat their chests infront of the other .1% of Guild War's playerbase.

These holidays are for everyone, not some narrow minded (elitist) viewpoint on what "fun" should be.

I believe this is why they made this new map and removed the other large one, which was my favorite. Since the new format doesn't allow for tactics, it's better to have small maps that just let people mindlessly bash at each other until one side wins.

You misunderstanding what a lot of people want. It isn't about pvp elitism or syncing. It's about playing something that is more fun than standing in the rings on Canthan New Year.

If you'dd read the intire post, rather than my intitial statement in which I clearly state why the view of PvE'er should be concidered less than the view of a PvP, in this PvP format, you'dd find I'm not some elitist PvP prick. As a matter of fact, I play more PvE than I play PvP.

I mostly tried to stick with neutral statements and point of views, but after all the title clearly says "PvP point of view". I love how PvP automatically gets tied together with elitist. There's no such thing as a PvP'er who actually knows what he's talking about, there's only an elitist prick who moans because he can't sync anymore.

Unless you've got something to contribute to this thread, aka your own opinion and/or actual feedback on mine, you shouldn't post at all. Every PvE'er posting here with such ignorance only feeds my belief the PvE-scene really is hopeless in trying to be thaught or lured in to PvP for other factors than farm.

I, and most other people, should stop reading the whole rant at this very point. Experience teaches that getting into a discussion with biased people (doesn't matter how, on what, why) always turns out badly, with the said people repeating their, often illogical, arguments over and over even though it's quite clear they whine for nothing or rage over a tiny thing they loved that got deleted from the game.

Up to this moment, it always gave you REAL reward. More Glad points for cons wins in RA, more Gamer points for cons wins in CB. It's FAR from being illusionary.
Now with the point reward being fixed rather than based on your wins, it simply doesn't matter how many cons you get in the first place. You just got used to them because of how they worked (and still work in RA) - more cons, more points - and obviously can't cope with the new way of solving the issue, aka consecutive or not, the total amount of wins matter, not their order. Apart of fixing syncing with that simple innovation, you also don't get mad after losing the Xth round because two of your team got dc'ed, as you shouldn't even care about consecs.
The whole part of the rant on how it's hard to get 3+ consecs now is just flawed within. There's nothing that would make you want to get consecs now; if you still do, however, it's just your personal whim. From the game's mechanics view, it's all completely fine, though it made getting Gamer fairly slower for actually good teams - but i can cope with that, even after 11th consec.

Believe it or not, but with a necromancer i was able to kill an assassin last year provided he didn't ambush me (as in: didn't shadow step to me when i fought someone else or just didn't notice him). Not always, sure - but it was more 60/40 than 10/90.
Your solution is just more power creep to the format that was relatively slow and meant to be enjoyable, based on low damage output (see: degen on both necro and mes bars in 2009, pretty low overall damage output but sin's). Power creep might make it more dynamic and make yourself more content with high numbers flying all over the screen, but i wouldn't want to play CB which's matches last 2 minutes before one side scores 20 points because of the damage output gone through the roof.

Sin bar wasn't the only problem of builds from 2009 and i'd prefer ANet and TK to fix the old ones rather then giving us completely new ones from a scratch (that are, still, fairly unbalanced), but sins were just too versatile in an already versatile environment.

Me thinks you played ONLY the assassin a year ago. Me thinks you've never actually tried to play a mesmer in CB, especially this year. The current mesmer build may not has high numbers flying all around, maybe you can't completely disable or kill an enemy in mere seconds, as you could with your beloved sin, but it's FAR from being boring. And it is DAMN versatile, with Echo providing a wide opportunity window depending on both teams' composition.
But well, to play a mesmer in CB on a decent level, you would have to think, pick targets accordingly and use good skills on your targets, not to mention timing your interrupts, rather than just mash 1 2 3 4 5 as with the Palm Strike sin - sorry!

So. You say that PvPers care about fun and not the rewards, or at least that's what the first sentence states - you may wish to reword it. Still, later, you say that 50 ToTs per hour are not enough to be worth playing GvG.
I thought that real, uber and leet PvPers didn't care about the rewards as the large part of PvE community, so 5/50/500 ToTs - why do you care? You still can play your GvG and ignore ToTs whatsoever.
Lazy PvEr deep within?

Because PvP is 'superior'? Maybe it was in GW's beginnings, but we're far from that point. But thanks for giving me another example of elitist PvPer that started playing in the first ~16 months of the game's life (basing on your Guru join date, that is). I find that people who started to PvP later, around Q2 of 2007, tend not to be elitist and may accept the fact that GW is no more predominately a PvP-based game. They also, much more freely, accept the holistic view on GW rather than keeping the old, rusty division on PvE and PvP as two completely different things.



Bottom line. I know the average 'CB skill level' is fairly low in the playerbase. And that's why i ALWAYS draw on the compass, explain what we're doing in that map and call targets. I ALWAYS say something along 'ele, go there and there, while the rest goes here'. In one group out of ~10, two or more people ignore me - that's quite acceptable. In one group out of ~15, there's another smart-ass that 'knows what he's doing' and tries to prove it despite he gets killed all the time, essentially making the whole group lose - that's an acceptable ratio as well.
And i don't yell at people or omg when they die, i slowly explain what they do wrong if i spot something at the beginning of the match. It works wonders - you might wish to get down from your elitist pedestal once and try it, seriously.


I haven't read the whole topic, just the OP, so if anything was already answered in exhaustional way, sorry for bringing it up again.


@down: that's exactly what i thought reading the OP. Still, i know lots of PvPers that are far from any elitist approach and they can have fun from the game as it is rather than whine about everything and try to prove being superior than others.

PvP doesn't automatically get tied together with "elitist". Just loud mouthed chest pounders telling us how it should be. I won't read the rest of your drivel because you do have a problem (even if you can't see it, or acknowledge it). Your response to my post shows this in spades. It would be funny if it were not so sad.

My opinion is that everybody should be able to play these holiday games how they see fit, and not what a PvP minded player instructs how they should be played. If that includes running around in circles, screaming "bork, bork, bork", that's fine. It's a holiday....take a break from your ego.

Stop trying to force your ideas of what "should be" during this event.

i wonder where you get that generalization from. i have played cb nonstop for the past 19hrs, and apparently every one grp out of ~10 actually listened to my advice on capping and tactics, while every other team just ran around all over the place with no coordination at all. do you know how ridiculous that is? in the last 2 yrs my exp of cb was lots of epic matchups between good teams, with intense strategic thinking. now? its just a big, chaotic slugfest, where everyone just spams out whatever dmg skill they got. certainly the gameplay depreciated significantly under this system. and i think that is what the op is arguing for as well.

for casual players, sure it is easy to say you will speak nicely and all that. but imagine for some ppl, who play 200 games a day in this system, i have to explain the same tactics every single game for 200 times. yea, its not a pleasant experience, as i basically copy+paste everything by the end. it is tiring and ridiculous, all thx to this new randomizing. there is not the slightest opportunity to develope any sort of coordination or tactic in a team, and absolutely no incentive to, because it is in such limited time. if so, wtf is a team for anyways?

Yet there is at least one very active thread in Riverside practically begging PvE players to reinvigorate dead formats. You honestly can't see how circular this all is? Beggars can't be choosers and in a dying/shrinking game this idiom is finally sinking in.

I personally think the CB rewards without the ability to get consecutive wins are on the low side. Full randomization also probably isn't the most elegant solution to the problem of syncing. Since this isn't considered formal PvP by Anet however, the whole thing is really moot. Just enjoy it while it lasts or not if you don't and let others do the same?