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.

I think some must come to terms that Anet is competing with Monopolies here, and they are pretty new to the terrain. They need to please both crowds, primarily the larger one first.

People need to stop shouting "PvE OR PvP, TAKE YOUR PICK! EITHER OR!" and start saying "We need to work this out".

A compromise is always preferable to an ultimatum

Here's a little rant of mine...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22co...ying+game%2 2

Guildwars is advertised as a CORPG, everyone in the competitive guilds play less and less now, and a lot have quit. The PR and updates are PvE focused only. You can see why we're upset about it, after all we did buy the game because of such advertising.

I agree with practically everything SAI said in that conversation.

This is what I did...

First, I look up on a skill list on a reliable site (hard to find one that update like mad now days...).
2nd, by knowing all the skills... I can come up with a good build...
3rd, I get my primary character and switch profession...
4th, I go to UW (UW was quite easy for me... if people care to listen) I believe they put underworld and fissure so players can earn their skill point faster... but apparently, most people can't handle it... I assume they are looking for an easier way for people who can't handle it.
5th, I go buy/capture the skills I needed for that build...

I have never complained about these things...
If I was born in the middle of a desert, I learn to find water... but I still wish there would be more water.
If I was born in the middle of a frozen land, I learn to keep myself warm... but I still wish the weather would be warmer.
If I play PvP in random/team arena to have some fun time, I learn to not expect rewards... but I still wish rewards would be given.

The only thing that I can not do anything about is... try to find a good group under an hour... for whatever reason. Good people are hard to find... Are you one?

Another thing I can not do anything about is... keep everyone in the world happy.

As soon as you get those skills, your guild loses a battle against a high ranking guild and needs to change the skills around, so now you have to go get more skills, rinse and repeat until your skill points are depleted.

What if you moved to the desert because I told you there was alot of water in an oasis, and when you get there you find out I was lieing, that there is no oasis.

What if I told you that a certain region of the land is warmer then the rest, so you go to live there and find out it's actually the coldest, would you come back to me in a bad mood, ready to give me a peice of your mind?

I don't think anyone ever expected to get anything to gain from Arena .

I'd say Standard AI's comments in the log pretty well convey the feelings of a PvPer.

If you think there is a reasonable way to unlock all the skills, you're full of shit. I have on of those nifty little print-out check lists of all the skills. As a rough estimate, I'd say I have *maybe* half unlocked. I have about 60 skill points on my PvE characters still to use, so that puts me solidly over 50%. For a nice point of referance, that 50% number is acheived with four characters played at least to the fire missions. Does this mean at my rate of play I will need to play through the game seven or eight times to unlock all the skills? Oh wait, I can do some quick underworld missions and skill points will be raining form the sky.

Makkert brings up a great point about nub teams vs good guilds saying that it wastes both parties time. Now one could agrue that the nub team should learn from whoever gave them a solid beating, but we know how often that happens I would also say this isn't so much a problem in tombs as it is in GvG. Since the widening (or removal?) of the point margin for guild matchups, there have been some problems. My guild (ranked 39 I think) has fought countless henchmen teams and even several people on their first go at GvG. Beating people is usually fun, but the matchups are just rediculous, not to mention the whopping 3 point gain for the (flawless) victory. And then of course we get steam rolled by some guild bringing their 3rd smurf to the first page and lose 20 points. Right now pretty much all the GvG ratio means is not wins:loses but Henchmen teams fought:real teams fought. Damn are we good at killing henchmen!

The moral of the story is: DON'T GvG with henchies! (unless you're ranked higher than us )

-Tuna, member of Dark Horizons

Hmmm, I've been flipping back and forth on this issue lately. My original take was, "I think it's a good idea that not every person has every skill." I think it's good that most guilds are not "infinitely responsive" to the meta-game. I like the idea that people have to make do with what they have. How Guild XXXX gets known for runing builds around a particular theme, because they've chosen to mostly unlock skills revolving around their preferred theme.

Another thought is, maybe ANet wants to "stretch" the current content to last until the next expansion pack next year? (That's kinda evil tho....)

Recently I convinced a friend, who was a casual player, mostly of FPS's and RTS's, who moved from WoW (we both thought the grind in that game was simply insulting to our intelligence) to GW. However, even the night I followed him around Pre-Searing, I could tell he was getting little bored. (After all, if you've just come from 20 levels of "Kill 15 wolves then come back to me", do you really want to do something like Pre-Searing?)

I'm sure he would have a blast just sitting down and playing PvP like it was an RTS - complex, lots of options, lots of choices. And I'm also sure the 40 hours or so of PvE to Ascend a character (which I enjoyed myself - I'm a fan of RPGs) would just be TOTALLY pointless time to him.

Now, if I was complaining about this myself, people would just reply "Go and play an FPS! Die bitch!", but my dilemma is - I know my friend can have fun in this game, playing in the situation I'm now in. But I also know he would NOT have fun playing the "149 Hours 8 Minutes since Creating your character 49 days ago" that it took me to reach my current state. How do I keep my friend in the game? (Because it's good to play with friends.)

Even rushing him with my high level character isn't really a solution - because it sucks to be babysat for the week or so that it takes...

I don't know what the best solution might be, but I'm beginning to agree there is enough of a problem that it warrants some sort of action.

But anyone who has read my posts would know that I'm always "full of ideas" (that get disagreed with >_<) so here's some stuff:

* More templates. Heck, divide the template menu into classes, and give us 8-10 templates for each Primary. Monitor template use - cull the unpopular templates and add new ones from suggestions in the forums and stuff. Provide all the "safe" builds that are popular. Ideally we want it to be perfectly feasible to play PvP at a good level using only templates, but it limits your ability to be "creative". Include equipment and runes in templates.

* Unlock stuff in PvP. I wholly agree. Even for random arenas and everything, not just GvG or Tombs. Right now most pvp is pretty "pointless" or rather, "just for fun". It'd be nice to feel like you're getting something for the time spent, even in random arena. And maybe additional rewards for winning, because it'd make winning more fun. I don't think beating crappy teams a lot for rewards would really cause a problem, since it's about as brainless as farming for XP or being run through the game by high level guildies. And it would, at least, be more fun.

Key point tho: Reward TIME SPENT in the arenas and PvP (or matches played), MUCH MORE THAN wins. Otherwise people will get too worked up about winning, where in the arenas it's often so conditional and uneven that your odds of winning are pretty random. Maybe another reward system more linked to success, for the Tombs and GvG games.

* Hmmm, here's an idea... (this is more for me than my friend, since he probably wouldn't enjoy playing pve even this much). If you have already unlocked a (non elite?) skill on another character, you can purchase that skill for subsequent characters at ANY skill trainer (or maybe post-LA or whatever). And it does not cost any skillpoints, and only minimal gold.

Sigh idiots...
I'm the only one who's still playing GW out of all Ladder to Hell crew. EVERYONE is already returned back to DAoC or WoW. I'm not playing DAoC or WoW so every Ladder to Hell member who had a MMORPG to return already left GW.
Ladder to Hell was 3rd in a guild ladder at the start. After that, some players decided not to play, we trained some more players. Still not enough, players continued to leave the game. We allied with another Russian guild RusCorp and got 10th place in a guild ladder (Out of Mana) in 12 hours of playing (we had 2 players in a team that never played PvP in Guild Wars). After that, all remaining Ladder to Hell crew has left the game. More than half of them were disappointed with the incredibly low level of competition, they said that there is no reason to play GW.

The most important reason why there is no competition is because everyone spends a lot of time farming. Most of the time clans can't field specific builds for PvP/GvG. Some people leave the game because they don't want to farm, so it makes even harder to field a group. Since it's hard to field a PvP group, some more people leave the game because they can't enjoy PvP. It becomes even harder to field a group. New players that just started to play in PvP can't play as good as more experienced players and they don't have a lot of skills/runes/upgrades opened, so "veterans" are unhappy when they lose because of that and more players leave the game. Since every clan have the same problems, competition is next to nonexistant so people who want a competition also leave the game. And so on, it happens every day.
The result is that everyone leaves the game, and the reason is because you need to spend shitloads of time farming to play competitive PvP.

Meanwhile there are people making threads like this.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...t=22312&page=1

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...2&postcount=17

Look at what Gaile shows the devs, that's nice. I really wish there was a PR person in charge of dealing with PvP PR, because we're ignored.

I can clearly see where SAI is coming from and all I do is PVE . Earning skill points is a very time consuming thing.

Keep in mind I have changed my secondary twice. And I do not recall if those skills points were refunded at the time or if I lost them ( I really think I lost some but could be wrong). But currently I am 304 hours old and 58 minutes , 48 days since creating this Toon ( I have had alot of free time the past month).I have a total of 471,768 XP. and only earned 61 skill points. Of those 61 skill points 1 is not used. And I have 14 mesmer spells and the rest monk. Granted some of that time is from mobs that did not reward me with xp (helping others out on early missions in the game) but still anyone saying it is easy to gain all your skill points pretty quickly might be in for a rude awakening later in the game. Now imagine having to do this with 3 other toons. *sigh* or even 2 for that matter.

That's what I'm saying. 2 toons are enough, provided you don't play every single role in your guild.

When you change your secondary all the skills you unlocked with your previous class are still unlocked, you just can't use them. When you switch back to your old class the old skills will come with it. No refunds since you still have the skills.

Red Locust:

Most would agree that a typicall build consists of 3 monks, 1 memser, 1-2 warriors, 1-2 rangers, 1-2 elementalists. By this logic, yes, you could only lock warrior and memser skills assuming you don't have secondary classes. However, what if the build calls for wa/ele instead of wa/me, or doesn't have a warrior or a memser at all? Just sit out and hope a guild mate happens to have the right combonation? You're little theroy vastly limits the flexibility of a guilds builds. If you want to win, you need to have all the skills.

But I was never close to unlocking all the secondarys skills on last 2, the ranger ( my first) might have had half. and the warrior only had like 10 at most. so I guess in total if I had of stayed the same professions I started with. I might have unlocked all the skills for both MO/R. But I was just switching around to try other stuff out. no other reason. I really could care less about unlocking stuff. I do not pvp. I am really poor at math and only 2 or 3 of the current skills were from the 20k cap update. so i guess take away 60k and then add up how many I earned off the old scale for skill points.

I guess for someone who soley bought the game for PvP that is alot of time investment in the part of the game you do not enjoy.


Why could they just not set something up where if you beat the game atleast you could have a PvP character with all the skills unlocked. And if you wanted the same class pve toon to have all the skills you would have to finish earning them. It would give the PvE something to work towards and yet make the PvPer's very happy I would think.


I thought I was trying to help out on SAI's point but I am tired so might not be making much since. *Sigh*

M Dew

If you do the math, if each person unlocked 3 class skills, that person would unlock 6 different primary/secondary character combinations out of a possible 30 different primary/secondary char combos. That means 5 people can cover all possible combinations, 10 can cover all possible combos two times over, 15 people can cover all possible combos 3 times over.

It shouldn't be too hard to find 15 PvP-competent people in a guild, should it? At least, not for those guilds who are into the high-end pvping and are complaining about not being competitive. Unless you're planning on running a group of 8 Mo/Me, I don't see a problem with this. If you have all skills unlocked for your Mo/Me, it makes absolutely no difference on the battlefield whether you have all other skills unlocked or not.

Yes, it could be inconvenient at times, but it beats the hell out of StandardAI's solution, playing the game for 800+ hours while trying to unlock every possible skill with 4 different characters and ending up with around 70% of all skills unlocked and at a disadvantage. At least this way you're at your full potential with all skills for your build unlocked.

Yes, it is inconvenient. Yes, ANet could fix it with an UAS button. But instead of sitting on forums all day complaining about it (not directed at you M Dew), you can adapt and figure out a way to get around this problem for now. Just takes a little common sense. I hope you're reading this, Standardai.

Oh Np Locust, You got a valid point as well. Guess in the end it is Anet's call. I just could see both sides of it. Or atleast I tryed too. And I am sure Anet is trying to solve the issue it just takes time. I plan on going into PvP sooner or later. I just enjoy the heck outta PvE still. I'm currently trying to beat Glint with me, healer hench, mage hench and the 2 fighter henches. No luck yet tho. Got her to half life almost every time but by then it seems to fall apart... I loose one of the warriors and inbetween locking glint down from casting and trying to get the warrior back up. I fall flat on my butt.

I hate to beat this dead horse again but what you are suggesting is what the pvp people do not want. You are saying in order for me to compete with my guild I need to unlock the skills of 3 professions. That is hovering about 300+ total hours played if I focus on nothing but skills in my grind. That is 12.5 days total if you played non stop. The average casual gamer is said to play about 2 hours a day. The grind of the casual gamer that wants to seriously compete would take 150 days or 5 months. This is why the competetive gamers are going back to there WoW, DAOC or BF2.

I loved this game during BWE and on my first trip through accension. Now I havn't logged on in almost 2 months and with the upcoming release of BF2 I probally will be deleteing it from my HD to make room for a game I play. The only thing that would bring me back to this game is a UAS button for pvp characters.

Yeah sure, but you know, there is a real life out there. So it never happens that 15 out of 15 players are online at the same time. Someone is not online and you can't field a group. Anyway, even if all 15 are online, then there is a group with 8 players. So other 7 players should login in the game and do nothing? You know, PvP players want PvP...
For example, we used Air Ele team build with just 3 characters builds - Air Ele (~9 skills, 1 elite, 1 superior rune), Healer Monk (~10 skills, 2 elites, 1 superior rune), Protection Monk (~10 skills, 2 elites, 1 superior rune). So, if you have 29 skills (5 of them are elite) and 3 runes, then you can fill any role in a group. When we discussed what else we can do, everyone admitted that it's impossible for us to field any efficient complex team build because we'll never have players online with the right skills.

Find that 15 PvP-competent people that will be online at the same time and that guild will be on a 1st place in a guild ladder in a week.

It's impossible.

Heh, looks like a pretty interesting chat log.

Some issues that obviously need to be adressed soon, If there's a thread about the ale icon being messed up, how some underworld armor looks the same as the normal armor, Gaile is quick to reply and comfort everyone. When serious PvP issues are brought up Gaile's posts are no where to be found, and we're brushed off and ignored. It's very easy to see why a lot of us are quitting the game, and to be honest I don't think AN cares at all, just less bandwidth for them.