User talk:Falconeye/Revamp/Skill Changes
Fascinating Idea[edit]
This is one of the most intriguing suggestions I've read since the Feedback section of the wiki was created. I think it might even be successfully applied to the game for the reasons you state. I do think you might have understated some of the objections, e.g. while it's true that every skill revamp affects player (and hero) builds, none so far have had even 1% of the impact this would have, unless you are counting the launch of Factions, Nightfall, or EotN. The mesmer un-nerf had a profound affect on some builds (Panic anyone?), but it basically affected one prof...and then not even every build. This change would require every single person playing the game to revamp every single build they are using — while that's an enormous impact, I suspect that you are correct that the long term benefits might be worth it. 100 (125) skills/prof is a lot easier to balance. I also think your idea of splitting PvE and PvP by using different skill names is clever: while it makes it harder to switch between modes, it would make it a lot easier to have interesting PvE builds without destroying competitive builds in PvP.
That said, I don't think this is ever going to happen. It is an enormous undertaking to select which skills remain in PvE for players/heroes, code for other uses for the other skills, and then ensure that what's left is balanced. Having done that, they'd have to arrange to play test every single mission and quest in the game, to make sure that there are multiple viable builds, that there are multiple synergies across professions and within parties, and so on. (I imagine that they might consider leaving PvP balance to the players, by watching what happens and making more frequent changes.) They'd also have to ensure that the current hero AI can make sense of the new choices (we already know that the AI has priorities based on skill type, resource costs, and that some specific skills are given higher priority in certain situations — it's probably a mess to disentangle that). And if the results don't work at least 90% as good as before, then the team will be fixing bugs and accidents for ages.
Even if the Live Team did nothing else but work on this project, it would probably take months and months to complete. And while the resulting game could be a lot better for players, I'm not sure it would help out ANet at all. Do we expect them to sell more copies of GW1? Would that bite into GW2 sales (and concurrency) — this is an area where ANet has done better than their competitors.
In short, the cost of getting this done well is steep, the benefits to ANet are weak, and the risks are high.
I don't mean to discourage the idea. Far from it. What I'd like to see is whether others (e.g. Aquadrizzt) are interested in the idea enough to do some of the legwork for ANet, e.g. figuring out which skills are most / least used and whether there are decent substitutes. I don't know that ANet would embrace collaboration with fans for something like this, but it would be a way to extend the interest in the game down the road. (On the other hand, perhaps they'd be happy if people stopped playing, so they could take down the servers.)
Regardless, I enjoyed reading the idea and imagining what the game might be like enough to wonder whether I'd come back to GW1 to try it out. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 08:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
