User:SylvXIII/Rants

Introduction

Here are a couple of rants I have about the game. This is simply for me to throw out some anger. Use of bad language below. Please refrain from commenting unless you have something to add to those rants or want to discuss a related subject. Alphabetical Order. Oh yeah, there's no Iron Rule in the World (except this one), so whatever is written below is subject to change in specific cases.

Content

Balance

This word, like all others cannot be defined perfectly though we all have an idea of what balance is. Game-wise, it's a word about the equilibrium of different game components so that not a single side has an unfair advantage and the winner is the player/team who played the most skillfully. Take Chess for instance. Both sides are exactly the same. There is in fact 1 difference between two players facing off: the first one to play. Even then, that part of the game is balanced as one can respond to a first move accordingly since there is space between the two armies, playing first or second is not such a big deal though it has some importance and proves that both sides are not perfectly equal, thus not a perfect balanced game. Perfect balance is unwanted. We want a good balance that tends towards being Perfect without being perfect. I won't explain why. Chess is a balanced 1 v 1 PvP game.

The components in chess are relatively simple. 8x8 square grid, different pieces, their position, movement possibility, victory condition and so on.In Guild Wars, Bars of 8 skills, party size, conditions of victory, skills, professions, maps, hexes, enchantments, knockdowns, magic, physical, ... there's a whole lot of stuff in here. In the end, this mass customization and intertwining of in-game components generates overly strong combinations purposefully or not (though most likely not). These combinations do things better than most balanced bars/skills and are difficult to counter.

There was a process in the game during which players discovered many skills/skill combinations that were utterly out of balance. Your team could get "buildwarsed" from facing a superior build than yours, partially disregarding player skill level difference. There were many many fixes. However it seems the game balancers have a little problem when balancing things out. Either they make an overpowered skill totally useless, make a bad skill overpowered or they do things right and balance up/down the power of a skill to bring it back to the power of other balanced skills (that are balanced between each other since balance is only relative between different components). The idea is simple. If a Warrior can dish out an attack skill dealing +37 damage with 7 adrenaline, there should not exist another skill that does the same +37 damage for 8 adrenaline with same activation time/recharge/attribute/properties/elite status. This is a problem in Guild Wars. There are good and bad skills. Fair enough: we'll only use good skills. In the good skills, whose power is clearly superior to bad skills, there are still some that are much better than the others. Now, the more powerful a skill/profession/primary attribute/etcetera, the more difficult it should be to play. If it's not difficult to play, then at least make it extremely costy in energy/drawbacks. Making a skill difficult to play/full of drawbacks even if the effect is very powerful tones down the effective power of the said skill to something balanced. I could make a skill "kill target unit" for 25 energy but I would add "every ally in the map lose all energy and you die". Would that be balanced to make it on par with normal skill such as Guardian? Probably not. I won't go into the example too much but I wanted to say that one can push the effective power of a skill to a lot, then balance it out with drawbacks.

Now why the fuck is Guild Wars less balanced that it was 4 years ago? Obviously, the game balancing process FAILED HARD. Why? I won't go into that but let's just say that I don't think they have any good player at Anet's as most game updates, even when targeting skills in need of balance, somewhat implies that the company didn't really understand what were the balance problems with those skills. This has led me to believe long time ago they don't even understand the balance of their own game. How's that? The game designers created the playground and the players made the game. The players figured out the best bars/best builds/best strategies and so on and many players understand the game, then again not all. I have played GW in my spare time and I am conscious of many balance problems with this game. It seems the game balancers are not. Yet, it's their job to take care of skill balance. So what's wrong? Is playing GW during Anet's work time prohibited or something? It only makes sense to play the game and understand it, to get in contact with the community and discuss with it even during your work hours. Well anyway, I'm not going to tell them what to do of their work time, but clearly, concerning game balance, it is clearly not well spent.

So I'd like to not only blame the workers of Anet for turning this good game into a mess. I blame them but I'm also going to blame the community. That's right I blame the community for actually playing the game and using the tools the game gives you, imbalanced or not, to win games. Sarcasm aside, many players play to win and it is therefore only natural to play imbalanced builds to do so. Realistically speaking, you cannot expect the players to not use imbalanced skills to win games when those said skills are implemented in the game. Some players then accuse others of being honor-less from using imbalanced builds so it's more of a value-war than anything else (Playing balanced builds or not). Guild Wars is now a PvE game....Competitive PvP is too complex for Anet to balance.

Flux

August 2011 +, I made a small comeback to the game during summer to complete my HoM and kill time. I noticed the flux in Pvp areas of the game and while it is very interesting to spice things up a little, September's Massive Damage Flux is a serious pain. Let's go back Pre-Flux though my memory is hazy. Take a look at this screenshot (2009 probably).

First, I'd like to mention the enemy mesmer was being an ass and the only pblock he landed on me was at the very end when he was the only one alive and I coudn't be arsed to fake. Our team was made of a Domination Mesmer (Pblock iirc), a Shatterstone water ele (me) (build described in my builds section), an Apply Poison rupter and a typical Axe Warrior. The reason we were so successful is because of the excellent team synergy we had:

• Damage: Axe Warrior + Ele + Poison Pressure from the ranger + Empathy (Probably something else from the mesmer but its been a long time)
• Interrupts: Dchop War, Magebane (I think), Dshot, Pblock (iirc, I could be wrong) + maybe something else from the mez. Rust also was a big helper for rez control and I was using it intelligently. Often we killed a damage dealer first, I rusted a rezzer, ranger dshotted the only non-rusted rez sig user (if they had a monk) and then took his time to rez control the other and they'd just wipe.
• Defense: Freezing Gust, Blurred, Empathy, Shock, Bull's, Shield Bash (mesmer), ranger stances, Pblock

You know this feeling after a couple of wins without a healer in RA that brings out the best of you? But not just you, your whole team starts playing at its best and you actually defeat solid balanced teams. It's a great feeling to be able to play with skilled players and to break the usual dogma that streaking in RA only happens if you have a Mo/W in your group. We did hard work and we deserved our wins, period. Unfortunately, then came a group we simply couldn't beat in the 21st game. They had a typical Mo/W and the killer Rit Healer with Xinrae's Weapon. Xinrae is a skill that is imo broken and should be nerfed but aside from that, nor me nor the warrior could dish out enough pressure to overthrow the strong backline they had while getting life-stolen the crap out of. A broken streak by a broken skill, how usual.

Next, the Massive Damage flux. It increases everyone's health by 200 but reduces everyone's armor by 20. Ouch. Here's the next screenshot.

• Damage: Invoke Ele, Mind Blast Ele, Stoning Ele, Enraged Lunge
• Interrupts: Meteor, Stoning
• Defense: Blinding Flash, Mirage Cloak, Ebon Hawk, Stoning, Barbed + Maiming Spear (I'm not even sure about this one, stuff blew up so fast)

What we did: kill the first target that gets into our range then tab, rinse, repeat. Against solid balanced groups, I'd call a target, we killed it, I'd call another and so on. Sounds easy? Well it was! I had a ton of fun blowing everything up, but there's something wrong with it: game balance. Granted RA is RA so whatever. But besides RA... "For the next month, Eles, Dervs and arguably Warriors are retardedly overpowered, enjoy!" Please be more concerned about how strongly the flux affects the game in the next months, Thank You.

September 8th 2011 update: Thank You!

Flux, Game Balance, 2012

I remember someone telling me top korean players quit the Guild Wars game because of the lack of balance towards Factions. I believe it: Koreans dominated this game back then. Whenever you'd encounter a korean team in tombz or TA, you were in for a beating. Beating them was an achievement. All of a sudden, they simply vanished and the game was left over to the rest of the world.

Point being, it took them a year and a couple of months to make it unappealing to the hardcore competitive players. The game is now over 6 years old. Regardless of the horrible game balance, lack of skill updates and such, I always found a way to get some fun out of it through PvP. Unfortunately, it seems the company's strategy is to gradually wear off the fun out of the game until players leave the game which many of us, including I have done (more than once). Regardless, skilled players often find a way to defeat bad players running op bars. Lately, the mentality of game balance has been "let's powercreep everything" with the end result being that it is increasingly irritating to deal with Anet's fuckups on game balance.

Then comes flux. I didn't mind the Quickening Terrain flux: the effect it had on game balance was minor. Then came Massive Damage, a monstrous powercreep flux that had to be rebalanced a week in because of the PvP chaos it generated. Now what's this? Minion Apocalypse...Granted it is fun when everything blows up because a guy killed another and then he exploded which killed another...It feels fun. But when I waste a whole day trying to streak a 25 and I fail, I can't help but feel they've crossed the line: my line. I wish I could make them stop touching PvP: stop changing stuff cause over the years, it has gotten worse and worse. I wish they would simply remove the flux, give up on skill balance forever and let the game with a half-broken balance that's more or less playable. It'd be boring, repetitive, gimmicky and not so balanced, but it would be better than ANY idea they can come up with concerning PvP. I'm probably just an idiot because I keep playing this game. Am I?

What's it going to be in 2012? How bad will Guild Wars 2 be? Is it going to be the same sad story over again?

Edit: I did manage manage the 25 after all. Had to be more than very patient to get a proper team (I wasn't synching).

Game Updates

[[1]] Christ they fucking fail. Recent update on 21st May 2010. They WTFNERFED SW to uselessness. On to PS sins again. They ... didn't change Bsurge at all. But hey they did things right with FC. About 5 years too late....but....they did it! A little nerf on SV is appreciated too. They buffed Mesmers...Ok...Why? Fevered Dreams now dazes everything you look at. Mesmers are not DPS damage dealers afaik. They should add "Exhaust target interrupted foe and all foes in the area" "Creates a Savannah Heat at target's foes location and knocks down everyone for 5 seconds" to Cry of Frustration. I mean, why not? They buffed Esurge to make it on par with VoR. So ok...Destroy a meta (Seeping Wound), create another gimmicky shit as powerful (Esurge Mezzes again! We'll see in the future anyway). In the end, they didn't balance the game at all. It's going to take half a year till they realize it's too strong and they will make bsurge take 1/356 of a second more in cast time. Mind Wrack...uh...lolwat? I mean....Mesmer was fine...Sure illusion was a little underpowered....

Anyway, the update has a few good things but as usual, they nerf something to oblivion and buff something that didn't need a buff into another broken. I mean, they need to give themselves some work for the future in order to hold their position as game balancer because we all know the game is perfectly balanced...not. They fail so hard at understanding why certain skills are broken and/or overpowered that it's laughable. I'm not even mad at them for sucking so much at skill balancing anymore. It's just another good joke from incompetent game balancer(s). At least they have humor.

gg

gg stands for "Good Game" or even "Great Game". Alternative meanings exist while in a different context and/or by adding a variant to the expression. i.e. "He dshotted my woh and savaged my patient, gfg!" means "He owned me because he did things right, can't do shit about that now" where "gfg" stands "for good fucking game". It's a common practice to say "gg" in good games and highly competitive games. A good game is typically something the 2 sides of the game should agree on. If you're stating "gg" in a game that was totally unfair, you're not being very respectful if you were the one with the advantage.

Dictionary definition aside, "gg" is by no mean a completely respectful expression. Picture it this way, you play Badminton and win 15-0 against someone on a 1 v 1. You both go shake hands. If you say "Good game, you almost had it", you're being disrespectful as this was NOT a good game as well as adding fuel to the fire by saying "you almost had it" which is far from the truth as the game ended with a score of 15-0 for you. In Guild Wars' realm, if you're on a team of 3 physicals + Healer and facing a Bsurge/Bflash ele, VoR/Empathy Mez, Oppresive Gaze/SV Necro + Healer, you will obviously lose. This cannot possibly be a good game because imba shit is imba and you have no chance whatsoever to win if the other team doesn't epic fail. If the other team says "gg", this is disrespectful and very offensive. Reactions to bad usage of the term "gg" are usually filled with aggressive comments/insults/flaming because of the other team being very disrespectful.

I don't give a shit if you admire a player in the opposing team because he has a trim or he's just good at the game, if you beat him with imba shit or had an obvious unfair team advantage, is it NOT a fucking good game. Don't fucking go on saying "gg" because people will read "fuck you lol we win you lose". If you can't understand this, you will fail with basic manners for the rest of your life, period. Now now, it's pretty respectful to say gg even if it's not a good game when you have a friend on the other side in Random Arenas. This is typical friendly manner. But for fuck's sake I'm so sick of disrespectful idiots who say gg all the time like it's actually good sportsmanship. Robot-like nice manners can't fit in every context in the world and keep their niceness. The game is quite bad at the moment, so good games are pretty rare in Guild Wars.

RA

Random Arenas. This used to be a pretty cool place to chill and try out new builds. When they introduced the gladiator title, things went wrong. People played RA to farm Glad points. Alright whatever. Nub RA scrubs would show up in TA and join g6+ pugs while sucking real bad at the game. Well whatever again. TA is gone now. Since then, RA has been pretty terrible. Wanna have fun to try a new build? You'll get flamed. Play something non-gimmick, you'll get flamed. Don't camp the monk like you're ordered to, you get flamed. Everything you do and not do is food for you to get flamed by RA shitters. The Arena is full of bad players who think they're good.

• You want to have fun
  • You play a real build and want to win
  • You play a funny build to win some
  • You grief like the shitter you are
  • You sync stupid shit with a friend

Whatever you do in the spirit of having fun is meant to laugh and have fun. Sadly for you, fun gamer, the Arena has become srs bsns, therefore unless you can take a little bit of flaming, you're not going to have fun. If you think running around and wasting everyone's time is fun, I think you lack to ability to empathize. (or whatever it's spelt)

• You want to play serious 4v4 PvP
  • You sync, if you lose on a 4/4 you fail, period.
  • You play a real build and hope for a balanced setup with half-decent allies (this is so rare it's worth a screenshot and you typically get wiped by OP broken shit later on)
  • You run an OP build/wiki shit because that's all you're good at.
  • You go in Codeadx Arena
  • You Flame every non-serious person in RA

Srs business is srs. It used to be laid-back but now, you've got so many srs players around this place that it feels like a Random Team Arena.

• The typical RA shitter
  • Flames you if you did something wrong
  • Flames you if you did something right
  • Flames you for things you could not do
  • Flames you even if he's the only one who did everything wrong
  • Flames your allies even if they did their job
  • Requests help from your enemies by posting in All Chat
  • Is an Assassin
  • Is on Do Not Disturb/Offline or puts you on ignore list if you say "Hi"
  • Is bad at the game
  • Doesn't know he's bad at the game
  • Can't do a single thing right
  • Tells everyone to attack the Monk 24/7

Much more in all honesty. The typical RA shitter is just a troll who sucks at GW and breaks the atmosphere. I've grown a filter against those.

Overall, RA is not very nice to play in unless you play for fun. Add imba and broken skills to the horrible community and you've got RA.

Ranger

Rangers used to be the most versatile class in the game, mainly because of their primary attribute: Expertise. 5 years later, what have rangers become? The least versatile class in the game... ok I'm exaggerating they're still the most versatile, but far less. Start by the good ole thumper: it was very strong. Nerfed! Ranger Spike, Nerfed! Ranger Spike, Nerfed! Ranger Spike, Nerfed! (that's about as many times it took) Any form of damage bow Ranger, Nerfed! Dagger Ranger, Nerfed! Spear Rangers, Nerfed! Touch Ranger, lulz. Ranger builds used to be different. You could play RtW, Apply Poison, Glass Arrows, Cripshot and so on. Really I don't care if these builds were overpowered or not (they were), but for fuck sake have the brain to realize that nerfing every fucking Ranger skill and putting it out of the game has freakin consequences! First of all, the main problem is Expertise's effectiveness on secondary profession. Ok cool, Shouts are not affected by Expertise. That's about the only good toning down of that primary attribute they ever fucking did. Now, what are Rangers? Just fucking Apply Poison Rupters. That's all they are. That's it! Nothing Else. You won't ever see a different ranger in high-end PvP. I've even seen some guy DEFINE Ranger as Condition Pressure and Interrupts. FFS they used to be trappers, thumpers, melee, Oath Spirit Spammer, anything! They could take a non-caster bar and turn it into a high-survivability version of it. Because Anet fucking failed at balancing Expertise, Rangers are down to one and only viable balanced option: Apply Poison Rupter. W/e's in beastmastery is broken, especially this. It used to be my favorite class. Oh yeah....almost forgot about nat stride. Can anyone remove that skill from the game please?

Stealing Kills

March 2012. After easily half a year of pvp inactivity, a friend suggests we sync. After a couple of failures, I get matched up in a not-so-promising team but as usual play it out smoothly. The game ends up being really close: 3 v 3 -> 2 v 2 -> Win. All that while our ranger bothered to type in team chat "Hey, that was my kill." What!? What is this!? Since when does this concept of stealing kills (which [I think] comes from FPS games) exist in a team game like Guild Wars?

Not to mention that while he was typing, he didnt take care of the rez control which our hammer war had to take care of (while I was dead). Naturally, since my character was dead and I had nothing better to do, well I heavily criticized my ranger comrade for his shocking comment but to no avail...

This Game

I've quit. I still keep an eye on the game updates which are definitely fail. I log on every now and then and it's always the same process. I log on, say hi to my Slovenian buds who still play GW. I take a few RA rounds to get used to my bars again/remember some tricks/play well. When that is done, I realize I'm still good at it, but that the game is full of imbalanced components, notably post-prophecies skills. I remember playing against Koreans....and that one time when I faced EvIL in GvG. They wiped us, we wiped them, they wiped us and won but I remember the heat&sweat, the thoughts going on in my mind, pre-proting the best warrior in the game and the thrill of victory (yet we lost :P)....Wow! That was something...I remember some good games like it was yesterday and yet those occured many years ago (litteraly). From figuring out how to abuse expertise in the early days and creating metas (fotm they used to be called) to pugging Tombz, playing solid level GvG, then realizing PvP became terrible after the introduction of Factions, I left to PvE. I decided to PvE after Factions in hopes that they'd bring back some balance by the time I'm done with PvE. This did not happen. Ever. Eventually, I somewhat started PvPing again, only to realize it sucked more than it had after Factions. I started taking more interest wasting my time in this Wiki than playing the actual game, which was something that had never happened to me before. I wrote some words on my talk page, voicing out some thoughts. Wandering on the wiki, I found out many other players had wasted their time doing the same thing: spelling out why the game is now bad and why it used to be good. I honestly don't have much to say but it was fun while it lasted. A year or two at best.

Cheers,
~Sylv