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Is sPvP ever going to be more than Conquest?

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SkylightMoon.2098
#1 - Aug. 6, 2014, 1:53 a.m.
Blizzard Post

I can definitely say it really has been two years now and if two years ago I told you and the sPvP community who was still here that two years from now, what would your reaction have been? Even when Anet had this whole E-Sports idea that didn’t work out too well, I figured that it at least showed them to be dedicated to the area of the game and that it would get a lot of content. I feel like objectively, even by GW2 standards, has had very little content added especially within the 2nd year of the games history.

The last map we had added for conquest was exactly one year ago, which also around that time, in September I think, we heard the devs talk about new modes. That was a year ago? What have they been doing? Its very dissapointing :/ I don’t think its unrealistic for any MMO that has a developed PvP community to ask for a new mode or just something that is significant. The feature update was nice but when you really think about it, it wasn’t all that much. It blurred the line between PvP/PVE, made UI changes, also made editing your build more convenient, and a reward track(which did give a lot more incentive to do PvP).

On a last note I think one reason this may be which is one reason for a lot of decisions probably made in GW2 is that the devs are really afraid of spreading their playerbase. I think this fear is constantly on the back of the devs minds. Ive heard them mention it many times in the history of GW2 because of their experience with GW1 where it did really affect the game.

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JonathanSharp
#28 - Aug. 8, 2014, 12:57 p.m.
Blizzard Post

@:“Is sPvP ever going to be more than Conquest?”

Yes.

@: Balance: it’s something we’re definitely keeping in mind as we experiment with different game types. Some things carry over just fine from Conquest, others become weaker, and others become stronger. It’s inherent/to be expected in having different goals in different game modes.

I can’t give out too much info, but I can let you know that we are working on a new game mode.

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JonathanSharp
#47 - Aug. 8, 2014, 7:20 p.m.
Blizzard Post

You guys know how we do it!

“When it’s ready”, indeed.

@ balance and splitting skills: Splitting the entire game into 2 (or 3, if you want to be technical: PvE, WvW, PvP) sets of #‘s creates a LOT of overhead in maintaining 3 sets of numbers. As most skills are fine across game types, it’s more efficient to split off problem skills and leave the majority of skills consistent across game types. It also means that people have a general sense of relative balance across all game types, and don’t have 2-3 sets of numbers to learn.

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Hugh Norfolk
#63 - Aug. 9, 2014, 1:46 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Yoh.8469:

One a separate note, how dismissive are you? Saying that people would have to learn a 2nd set of numbers if you split skills. How stupid do you think people honestly are?
Your basically saying people are so stupid, so lazy that they can’t read a skills description, and can’t comprehend that they work differently in different game modes.

I’m not saying this is intentional on your part, but it’s sounds so ugly and dismissive of your player base. Personally it just sounds like a cop out, and excuse to put as little effort and resources into balancing your game as possible. And forget about new anything to professions, what a joke.

I don’t think that was Mr. Jonathan’s intention at all Yoh. I believe he was merely saying that skill changes between game type(WvW, PvE, and PvP) can be hard to understand and cause confusion to some players.

As a mock example, Lets say you play PvE with your awesome build that gives you 5 seconds of fury when you use a skill and your build relies on it being 5 seconds. However, we split that specific skill only in PvP and you go play and realize only after playing a few engagements that it only gives 3 seconds of fury. Then you go to WvW and realize that the skill is back to 5 seconds of Fury.

  • How does that player feel?
  • What questions is that player going to ask?
    * Is this a bug?
    * Why is it only different in PvP?
  • Who is going to answer those questions?
  • Are they going to try and seek out someone to answer these questions?
  • Is the person they (if they do ask) going to know the actual reason for this change?
  • Is that player going to stop playing PvP or GW2 all together?

The simplest change can have a huge effect on a player in any game, and when you start splitting skills and causing inconsistencies on top of balancing multiple game modes it can get a bit crazy for players to keep up. I hope this helps everyone understand what questions and thought process we go through as a team when deciding on splitting skills.

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Hugh Norfolk
#65 - Aug. 9, 2014, 1:56 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:
Hugh Norfolk.2798:
  • Is that player going to stop playing PvP or GW2 all together?

I have a hard time believing this has ever been a source of concern for any developer at Arena Net, ever

No offence

:)

The question can be asked for any game type, but we have asked it.