AN IDEA TO COMPLETELY CHANGE HOW CHARACTER BALANCING IS APPLIED IN GW2

[SonicMaster92]

As we know, character balancing in GW2 is designed to balance out the different classes when it comes to competitive online multi-player. For example: by reducing the more-than-adequate overpowering characters' strengths to a certain level, while increasing the less-than-adequate underpowering characters' strengths to match. If it's too less or too much for a character, he or she becomes severely unbalanced in the battlefield. The character upgrades are also taken into closer consideration; too powerful, and it becomes easily overpowering; too weak, and it becomes very underused and underpowered. These kinds of character balancing applied by the dev team are to insure that everyone's experience isn't scarpered by the inconsistancies created by the over- or under-balancing of characters in competitive online matches. Good work with that, but there is one huge problem:

It's not just the competitive online modes you're doing the character balancing for; it also affects every other game mode (private or otherwise), including ops mode, online boss hunt etc., making the whole experience feel very bemoaning, turning away a lot of potential customers that buy your products. It also affects character upgrades, being less-than-significant in most other areas of the game. Even characters' unique abilities are affected as well. Everyone is crying out for a radical new change to character balancing, and it's now or never.

So, just to try and bang some sense into the dev team's heads, here's how character balancing in GW2 should be applied (hence the topic):

If you introduce the option to turn on or off character balancing for most other areas of the game, all characters' and classes' nerfs will be removed, giving them an edge against the AI in areas like solo or private turf takeover, ops mode etc. For example, Rose's original health was 125, she is currently at 100. Remove character balancing, and she goes back up to 125 health. Also, their individual upgrades will be much more significant (speed upgrades, damage upgrades, ammunition upgrades etc. are greater in strength), the same goes for their abilities. You can turn on or off character balancing in the backyard battleground, and before the start of many modes in the game. And there should be "no XP or coins penalty" for turning off character balancing, so no-one misses out on their spoils.

For other areas like online Boss Hunt and the Trials of Gnomus, character balancing should be always turned off, therefore giving everyone a better chance to clear their objectives, especially on the hardest difficulty level.

And for the competitive online modes of the game (online team vanquish, online turf takeover etc.), character balancing should be always on, with the nerfs applied to each concerning character, as per normal. In this case, if people decide to go into the competitive modes listed below, a notice will pop up, notifying them that character balancing is always turned on.

Where does this apply:

Modes listed in red indicate character balancing is always turned on

Modes listed in blue indicate character balancing can be turned on or off; it's always anyone's choice on how they like to do it in

Modes listed in brown indicate character balancing is always turned off

Online Welcome Mat, Online Mixed Mode, Online Team Vanquish, Online Vanquish Confirmed, Online Gnome Bomb, Online Suburbination, Online Turf Takeover and Online Super Mix Mode

Solo/Private Team Vanquish, Solo/Private Vanquish Confirmed, Solo/Private Gnome Bomb, Solo/Private Surburbination, Solo/Private Turf Takeover, Solo/Competitive Ops Mode, Backyard Battleground and Flag of Power

Online Boss Hunt (all difficulty levels), Trials of Gnomus

I want this passed on to the dev team, and I ask them to make this idea a high priority, because unless it's applied soon, satisfaction from customers of GW2 will go downwards. It's one topic I don't to see ignored by the dev team, dear-heartedly.

In the meantime, everyone else is free to view their opinions on this. I'm open to improvements for the original post.

[realitysquared]

While the idea of giving Players a "God Mode", which is basically what you're proposing, for private play is going to be appealing for some I think you've completely missed the point of both the Trials of Gnomus and the Boss Hunt Mystery Portal event.

Both the Trials and Boss Hunt are intended to be hard and both are intended to tax the skill set of the Player so it makes little sense to introduce a feature to either which essentially holds your hand in what is supposed to be an uncompromisingly difficult situation.

I know there is a tendency for people to think that everyone is entitled to a trophy or prize at the end of a competition but game modes like Boss Hunt set to Crazy difficulty is intentionally hard in order to separate the best players/teams from the average and I personally wouldn't support an effort to water those experiences down.

[SonicMaster92]

You've got to remember, that there are many people turning GW2 down because of the rather harsh character balancing applied to all modes of the game so far, and that's just not cool. By introducing this "on or off character balancing" option, and completely removing character balancing in Trials of Gnomus and Online Boss Hunt, it reduces the unnecessary level of pain people experience when doing both.

Take the Spooky Squash Boss Hunt for example: It's simply way too difficult for younger people to do. There's not enough information and mid-session hints for younger people to follow, therefore making defeating a boss hunt just out of their reach. Characters upgrades were just too underwhelming to say the least. When it comes to earning the particular type of special item in Boss Hunt, just trying to earn it is just near-impossible.

As for the Trials of Gnomus, when it comes to beating a colour-specific boss in the battle area, all Plant and Zombie characters have so much of a hassle actually trying to beat that boss while trying to survive wave after wave of smaller gnomes attacking them.

For all other areas listed in Blue in the Original Post, everyone has more freedom with how they want to play the game.

By doing this, the dev team has more freedom with tuning every character in the game, tailoring their powers for each and every mode in the game, as long as they follow the specific criteria shown in the Original Post.

[realitysquared]

My apologies but I have to disagree.

Plants vs Zombies might be a goofy sort of silly game which has fun being ridiculous but that doesn't mean that every aspect of every difficulty level needs to be determined by it's prepubescent demographic. If that were true "Crazy" difficulty level for Garden and Graveyard Ops wouldn't exist.

Boss Hunt was obviously designed to be a complex cooperative team play mode and trying to successfully survive it when set to Crazy difficulty is intended to be tough and only the most skilled players are going to get the special prize item associated with that tier of play and if an 8-12 year old simply can't survive at that level of play then they have my sincerest sympathies but at the end of the day it's an optional game mode which has no effect at all on the overall game and Players who simply cannot rise to the challenge can simply ignore the Portal for the 4 days of the month when Boss Hunt is active.

The same can be said about the Trials- there is no requirement that you finish the Trials and it doesn't effect your overall game experience if you don't or can't. Not getting the Torchwood or Hover Goat 3000 is not a game breaking issue unless you're an obsessive completionist, in which case not having every single character and every single one of roughly 8000 ever-expanding customization items eats away at your soul anyway.

My point is that I personally enjoyed the Trials and continue to enjoy each Boss Hunt precisely because they feature an extreme level of difficulty which is a nice juxtaposition against the rather vanilla, "everybody gets a trophy" nature of the rest of the game where every player who puts in enough time and effort can eventually get every character, finish every quest, and earn every item just by showing up.

Having two areas, completely optional areas, which demand that you be more than average and rise to a demanding challenge is not a bad thing. I enjoy my Unicorn Chomper because I worked hard to get him; I can look at the Scrumptious hats that I've earned from Boss Hunts and know that my team and I truly earned those with skill, communication and a lot of time and effort and when I play my Torchwood or Hover Goat 3000 I know that I literally had my skills as a Player tested before I was allowed to use them.

If you want to boost the younger, less skilled players with cheat codes and "God Modes" during single player then that's fine- nobody is going to begrudge that because it's private play but such things need to stay out of the areas which are intended to be difficult and require above average play otherwise you might as well just remove "Hard" and "Crazy" difficulty altogether and insert a "Beginner" and "Easy" mode instead.

[SonicMaster92]

I'm still standing by my original post. Agree or disagree, I still want the dev team to take this into strong consideration. Isn't that right, @EA_Andy?

[CoZiosco]

ps4 team balance is sooooo bad

[B0RiS_THE_FR0G]

Hmm, i'm with Reality on this one because i don't really see any positives in simplifying a game purely on the grounds of accommodating lesser skilled players. It's quite sad that today's gamers would much prefer to have things presented to them on a plate as opposed blood, sweat and toiling something in order to gain that overwhelming sense of satisfaction in being able to say they've achieved a goal that few have matched.

I sat for almost 6 hours trying to nail a 29.15s lap at Atlanta (NASCAR heat evolution) to gain the final 'elite' ranking and a 20g achievement for a 1000 gamerscore. It was hard beyond belief but in investing the time and effort not only did I beat the time, I completely mastered tuning the car, mastered racing in simulation mode and improved my overall track skills. If that particular challenge would have been somewhat easier (I lost count of the times I wished it was) then there would have been zero benefits in it's completion.

Moments like that are what gaming should be all about.....

[Screion]

There is a simply point why different rulesets in different games will hurt the playerbase: they split the community. Even if its just a mindset.

Having two different rules will not only confuse the players, it will also add complexity where it is not needed. All the different game modes and their difficulties already require different playstyles to be effective. So if someone does have problems dealing with enemies as a 100 HP character, they can switch to easy difficulty (where enemies deal less damage).

Not to forget that there are characters that are easier to play specifically for casuals.

What we need instead is actual balancing, based on the experience of players with knowledge about the game. And balance that is applied differently to each version of the game.

Popcaps main problem seems to be that they simply don't have enough funds to pay professional players for feedback that is not simply an opinion, but actual experience that is written down in a contract. And that being said; it should not be easy to find players to hire for a rather unknown game with a focus on humor and colors.

Instead they listen to the crowd on twitter and fool around with things that went wrong multiple times (which actually drove mid-core/harcore gamers away).

What Popcap should do instead is play their own damn game (and not just the console version), give players more reasons to not play 6 Imps - or whatever the meta is right now - in one team (quests are a step in the right direction but more effective solutions are needed), give players more reasons to experience the whole game - and not just one team/class (quests again, but ineffective) and find effective ways to keep people playing through whole matches (the shorter timer at the end of each round came again from complaints that did not help at all).

I think the best change that came from feedback so far (in a world where Popcap actually balanced the game), is the placing of the Mixed Mode closer to the center of the mode selection screen. That actually had an impact on players. It could even be the main mode presented right at the center. Because Mixed Mode gives a much better impression of how the game works with all the different classes.

So here are a couple Quests Popcap could add to the board that simply make me laugh:

• complete a Turf Takeover/Gnome Bomb game as Imp without calling a Mech
• complete a Turf Takeover game as any Peashooter without the use of the Pea Gatling
• complete a game as any Corn without the use of Husk Hop
• capture 3 Garden in Turf Takeover as any Pirate
• capture 3 Graveyards in Turf Takeover as any Cactus

...

Because in the end it's the players that play the game wrong/abuse the mechanics. And while Popcap has to find a balance for that, the players need reasons to adjust their behavior.

[realitysquared]

Unfirtunately you can't use Quests to encourage players to use characters in a specific way in GW2- I understand that a bunch of Z-Mechs in Turf Takeover can be challenging, as are the Pirates and Cactus who stand off in the distance and headshot you, and so on but if you push out Quests which require not using certain abilities or playing a character contrary to its intended design all that will happen is that Players will go to the Solo mode, turn off the Teams so they're alone and just knock out those Quests for the Stars and return to Multiplayer to continue to play in the manner that bothers you.

In any game there are going to be players who get good with certain classes who, by their very presence, unbalance even a perfectly balanced game and I think that is a good part of the constant complaints about balancing in GW2.

[Screion]

I know what you mean. The best example is how people simply power-leveled their characters in single player to be max rank much faster. What took me over half a year, they did in days.

But it's not about Quests as a specific solution. My general approach is to give people more reasons to play in likable ways. And with that being said, there is still ways to enforce healthy rules.

I mean, as much as i love to see 6 Chompers going completely ham in one match, or 8 Super Brainz jumping all around - it gets old when it happens every third match. And its with no surprise the Imp who causes most of these problems. So technically each class could be restricted to 3 per match. Or anything like that.

But GW2 even fails to inform the players about what a healthy team is. Overwatch for example tells the players their team does not have a healer, or tank.

Popcap simply made a lot of mistakes in their general design. Having a funny chaotic game is one thing. But people playing as a team and approach certain things with a couple thoughts beforehand is something completely different. And yes, that needs more than a couple Quests. But they can help.