Why Transparency is paramount to success.

#1 - Oct. 20, 2012, 1:08 p.m.

Hello.

I spend a good deal of my free time conjuring up Warrior Builds. Making Warrior videos, and doing things most active players do: Find new and creative ways to be successful at sPvP.

Concerns:

One of the biggest concerns I have to the long term success of this game is Transparency from the GW2 sPvP Dev team to the sPvP Community.

While I believe the Devs have the greatest intentions of creating a meaningful, interesting and successful PvP experience (hey they want their game to succeed right?) I also have noticed there isn’t much community interaction.

On these message boards we rarely get straight responses. More often than not we have threads full of complaints / worry, with very little in reassurance. Generally, we receive information in the form of game-wide announcements (news). But this news gives us broad strokes of concepts that will be debuting in the near future.

Concepts aren’t what the community yearns for. The community is extremely interested in expanding the BREADTH of game play available, not the depth.

Examples of Breadth:
-More interesting weapon mechanics giving way to a larger diversity of builds.
-More interesting maps / map types giving way to a larger diversity of sPvP game types.

Examples of Depth:
-Paid Tournaments using the same maps.
-Paid servers using the same maps / gametypes.

While stat tracking, Paid tournaments and other things are fantastic towards the eventual growth of the game, many people are burning out from lack of concepts/diversity and general game types.

Transparency is paramount to success:
If there is more at play here that we aren’t being told, such as:
-Profession balance / weapon reworks and skill changes
Yet we aren’t being told about them. I implore ArenaNet to give us headway so we know that our thoughts are heard.

Until then, most of these sub-forums will be filled with the following thread subjects:
-Nerf X
-Why is X team composition so OP
-Where are the other gametypes?

With some Transparency I think we all would be a little more at ease with the direction the game is going.

I think we all just need a little reassurance.

Thank you for reading and your time.
-Defektive

Edited by Moderator to remove text size formatting.

ColinJohanson

#6 - Oct. 20, 2012, 2:05 p.m.

We totally agree! We’re working on another upcoming PvP stuff update that’ll be coming out shortly once we’ve verified everything is working correctly.

We’ve actually posted in a number of threads here (now no longer on the front page) detailing what our plans are in the near future for SPvP, as well as posted a blog post that summarizes what’s coming shortly, and the build note preview on paid tournaments for the Halloween update. We’ll be going into more detail specific about competitive pvp next week on the blog including screenshots and feature descriptions, and of course will continue to update in these forums as well.

Transparency in every part of the game is very important to us, and I think you’ll be thrilled so see how quickly new features for pvp come rolling online over the next few months. This is a huge focus for us, and a community and part of the game we take very seriously, and we’ll strive to keep making sure you all know what we’ve got planned, and where we’re taking the game to reach its ultimate long term goals.

ColinJohanson

#8 - Oct. 20, 2012, 2:19 p.m.

Yeah just to clarify, the update before Shadow of the Mad King will be a written blog post update summarizing a bunch of information about upcoming features and pvp additions.

We realize there are a number of key features required to both grow and expand the pvp community, and we’re both actively developing all of those, and ready to talk about some of them in more detail next week.

As for class balance and skills, other teams not directly working on the pvp features are working on that stuff and will give updates once they have a clear plan in place. What we don’t want to do is post and say, “We’re doing x and this is how it’s going to work!” and then come back say, “no we lied we are actually doing Y”. We have a strict policy of talking about features and changes once they are far enough along we feel comfortable they are going to work, so we’re actually always delivering on our promises.

ColinJohanson

#9 - Oct. 20, 2012, 2:24 p.m.

Also that should say the next pvp update will be a written blog post with pictures and more that’ll come sometime around/after the Shadow of Mad King release, I’m on a roll today =)

ColinJohanson

#16 - Oct. 20, 2012, 4:09 p.m.

You misunderstood me, there is an entire group of people working on balancing the game as I write this…

Tyler Bearce

#85 - Feb. 23, 2013, 12:04 p.m.

Soryuju.8164:
It sounds like they had big plans for November-January, but the reality is that those months had very little to offer for PvP, with Temple and the new Paid system being the only really notable changes (invisible matchmaking to a lesser extent). They’ve said numerous times that making new maps is relatively easy, meaning that Silent Storm/Spirit Watch can’t have sucked up that much of their development time. So where did all of their plans go? What exactly interfered with their schedule when visible changes have been so rare?

Custom Arenas were taking longer than our original estimation, so we temporarily postponed the feature to get the Ratings & Matchmaking system in. While I won’t say how close the Custom Arena feature is to release. I will say that we are back to working on it, as well as Spectator Mode – as hinted at by Colin’s “Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead” January announcement.