Coversations, Ideas, Etc.

I know some of the PvP'ers have been dissapointed with the game so I spoke to StandardAI via XFire about what he thought should be done. This is a conversation with me, the PvM'er vs. the PvP'er.

I hope this will help eachother solve the conflict, and in time, better understand eachother. Please keep everything here civil, I understand the issues from both sides, and I support neither. Both have their ideas, and both work well, but for different gameplay elements.

I would be for an unlocking through PvP system...that would work

That would work yes, with a good system im 100% for it.

I have one question for you, Kiwi. Why do the PvE rewards have to be PvP based?

PvP based= Runes, item upgrades, and the grand majority of skills. So, basically, stuff that is useful in PvP but wholly unnecessary in PvE.

I just don't understand why the PvE concept of "rewards" has to apply to our world. UAS/UAR would not be for PvE.

An Open Letter

First off, one thing i don't understand: i thought it was possible to unlock skills through PvP? Don't you get a skillpoint every rank you get?

That asked, I see a lot of misunderstanding for the PvP crowd here. This game is, much like the devs said themselves, like magic: the gathering. I have played this game for 8 years now, and every week i play Guild Wars I see some new recognisable elements of M:tG back in G W. Let me describe the common (!) occurence each time a new set of Magic is released. A new set appears, and players think: this card (read GW: skill) is great! Or this one sucks! it is the worst ever! And often, they are plain wrong for lack of insight.
Same goes for Guild Wars. The skills aren't bad. You just haven't found the rightskillset to put them in. So yes, a real PvP-er needs all skills unlocked, or practicly all. Comparing to MtG again: in mtg one builds a deck with 60 cards. In GW one builds a group with 8 persons * 8 skills = 64 skillshots available. Most of the builds I see here on this forum are builds focussed only for their character. Not the entire group, the way a PvP er thinks. Or so I assume, I'm a PvE-er at the moment myself, that plans on PvP. So what is the point of this? Why is that little comparison interesting? Well, it takes skilled persons to show the potential of some skills. There will always be builds that win a bit more then some other builds. In a healthy magic environment, there are at least 3 top archetypes, followed by a number that wins mabye a little less in percentage. The dominant forms always gets a lot of hate of players, because they are sick of facing that type again. In GuildWars, the AirMage build is one of those topbuilds at the moment from my understanding by reading this forum. Once a dominant form is present for some time, the hate becomes stronger and stronger: players call for a banning of the card, or in Guild Wars for a 'nerf of this and that skill'. But often the answer is allready around. The skill is present, but it takes that skilled person to find it. Now when ANet is allienating the real PvP crowd, it can cause a delay in the response time that it takes players to find this answer to the dominant forms. This will make the game less enjoyable in the long term.

The fact that PvP-ers are forced long time to do stuff they hate is offcourse not a kind solution. I see that the XP cap and new skillquests are a step in the right direction, because they help to get all skills faster. However the skillquests are just the thing the PvP crowd hates to do, find them boring. I reckon they also don't have fun in beating PUG's over and over. And if I would do battle and see the guildtag of karma, lotd, korea, iq, etc on the other side, I know that it is a waste of my time and theirs. As a bonus, I can only imagine the way the PVP crowd that betatested for ANet feels now. They helped develop the game, and now feel not heard.
On the positive side, ANet does weekly patch. And that is very quick, for a game with no only online fees. So there is hope.

What I propose:
Set a skillpoint trader in the game that sells a skillpoint for 10k or maybe even 15k. I reckon the PvP crowd has quite a large amount of money by selling sigils. For them, this amount of money should therefor not be a large problem i think (correct me if i am wrong). This would also help stabilize the economy further by having a very large moneysink.
Another option would be being able to do all skillquests again if you change your secondary. frankly it pissed me also off that i wasn't able to do this.
As for the battle system, I would suggest a 2 layer system. the first layer is where majority duke it out. Continuously, the top 20% (?) of the first layer can duke it out in then in the toplayer, where topguilds can duke it out to see who gets demoted to first layer.

You may flame me now.

kind regards,

Makkert
Administrator www.cardfloppers.com

kiwi edited out the part where we started e-kissing eachother =\

On a side note, I find it quite funny that people think they need to unlock all skills to be competitive. What are there? 30 different class combos? If you went through the game twice with 2 completely different characters, you'd unlock skills for, what is it, 12 of those 30 combinations? A group of 8 people could easily cover all possible primary/secondary class combos, and most guilds are much bigger than 8 people.

It kills me when I see beta testers who think they're all high and mighty cause they've played the game from the first betas (as if myself and most people haven't) come in and claim they need all 500 or whatever skills unlocked to "be competitive". Yeah, I'd love an UAS button, but it'd only save me less than 100 hours of pve play, and I've done that already. You don't bloody need to be able to fill every role in the game, that's what guilds are for. If you can't do it, I'm sure someone else can.

All these posts about how people are gonna leave the game make me laugh.

I don't know if this was stated above because I don't have time nor do I want to read through all of this lol. Why don't they just allow everyone to unlock everysingle skill for the prim and second classes once they beat the game? If they want to change seconds then to bad you have to go and do it the old fashion way.

you'd need atleast 8 people on with the right skills at any given time in your guild to run a build, and what if the meta game changes and you choose an entirely different build with different classes? Go try to join a vent pug with only 70 skills unlocked, they probably won't let you in if you don't have certain skills.

People have already left the game, members of the best guilds are playing less and less each day, or quitting. That is the reality not that anyone in the majority cares.

Everyone in my guild has ascended atleast twice, we still don't have nearly enough skills as we'd like. Half of this part in your post didn't even make any sense.


"As a side note" No you don't need to unlock a single skill to compete, but you need nearly all of them unlocked to be competitive.

Let me clarify then, since apparently you didn't understand.

You unlock all the skills of 3 classes. Let's say you go through the game once, unlock all Ele and Necro skills. Go through the game again, unlock some Monk and [insert profession] skills, switch your secondary to ele/necro, and continue to unlock all monk skills and whatever ele/necro skill was left from 1st char. that isn't unlocked yet. You just unlocked 3 professions.

Everyone else in your guild gets assigned a different set of 3 professions to unlock, and every possible build is covered. Your guild collectively has every single skill unlocked, you are never at a disadvantage. Your guild is thinking of a build that involves 3 monks, a warrior and 4 ele's? Find out who in the guild has each class unlocked and put them on the team. Don't tell me with the coordination going on during guild battles, that guilds can't arrange something like this.

This becomes even simpler if everyone unlocks 4 class skills, then a group of 8 people could easily cover every single profession combo 3 times over, although the amount of work involved in unlocking 4 classes is quite a bit more. Bottom line, you do not need every single person to unlock every single skill .

They should have just disabled the PvE in maybe one of the betas so people would have had to play PvP and actually understand what playing PvP really means. I don't think beating the PvE at the door to the tombs (or the first round inside) counts. And for those that don't know, HoH is the last map in tombs, not just another name for tombs.

You need every skill.

Sorry that's 150 skills, you'd need to beat the game twice, as in beat every mission in the game that gives you a skill point, to even come close to unlocking all necro and ele skills. This just goes to show how you don't really understand anything about the game, and why if you don't understand the skill point problem, or how pvp works, you should stop arguing against/flaming those who actually do know what they're talking about. k thx

I agree, it's incredibly hard to get Skill Points, after beating the game most people have around 45~50 skill points and that's not even close.

--Ginko

Read the second part of the post? Use any remaining skill points from second char. to buy skills that you're missing. It's very possible to get all skills this way, if you do UW/FoW missions and some of the grinding that you'll be doing anyways to unlock runes. Please know what you're saying before posting.

And I say again... that would work so much better than arguing for or against UAS so nothing ever gets decided

I don't even understand that, even after beating everything in the game twice you STILL wouldn't have enough points to unlock all of the skills on two classes, let alone have any skill points left.

Even if you grind as efficiently as possible, it will still take hundreds of hours to unlock every skill.

I agree that rewards gained through PvE should have an effect in PvE and PvP should have rewards that unlocks things in PvP. Every win in PvP could give you an additional skill point. 1 point will buy a skill, 3 an elite skill. In the harder arenas, you'd also unlock equipment or runes every time you won.

Look on the bright side. ArenaNet has been extremely receptive to player concerns for the entirety of the time that I've been following this game. Come back in 3 months and I'm almost positive that there will be a solution to the PvP grind.

I agree completely. Why shouldn't there be unlocks-per-win? Otherwise, it doesn't seem like there is a point to PvPing other than.. having fun.

Besides, Anet needs to do something for the PvP community before the rest of the game crumbles to the dust. Hopefully we'll see this within the comming weeks.

(pve- player vs enviroment pvp- player vs player) just in case you don't know.

I think the problem lies in the new people that are playing it. They are used to that grind from all the other pve/rvr/pvp (what ever you want to call it). My understanding of this game, even from the first expo play, was that it a pvp based game with very little pve grind. The bad thing is that the pve in this game is good. Not only graphical but fast paced and challenging. So now you have that EQ/WOW crowd coming here to pursue this game as a pve enviroment. Oddly enough there is a pretty large group of these players wanting to be heard. Just look on these boards for things like this game has gotten to easy. This is a prime example of the player base that wants rich pve content.

Now for the player base that wants what was promised from the get go feels cheated. I know I am frustrated after trying to make builds work with 1/4 of the deck. I don't mind pve too much but there comes a time when I want to do what I bought this game to do. When I go hit the arena people always want what I don’t have or I wish I had something to fix a hole in my character.

I also think its sad when you beat the game and still don't have half of the skills unlocked for either class. I can live without the l33t sword and runes but you are severely gimped when you don’t have access to most of the skills groups want.