Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.

1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.

2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.

3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.

First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.

I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise.
We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.

• Players need more rewards for WvW.
• Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
• Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
• Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
• And so and and so forth.

We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…

TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.

OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!

Jon

In response to using portals to stack players and pop them into the middle of an army causing increased server load where models don’t load fast enough:

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Hey all we have some plans to fix some of this. It is currently being looked at so expect a fix in the next few weeks. Basically we like that Portal has this power, but it shouldn’t be able to bypass walls, etc.

As for the problems with players not appearing this is a more difficult engine problem to solve. While we would like to solve it there are definitely counters to this strategy, because anyone doing it has just clumped up their entire team for AoE nuking. Ultimately if they outnumber you by a lot there are much more effective ways for them to kill you.

Jon

More interesting, does this mean we’ll see a nerf to the Portal skill where Mesmers won’t be able to hide out in keeps and open portals to allow people to sneak in?

During Tuesday’s update, we saw some pretty significant changes to the dungeon reward system, and how reward tokens are affected by diminishing returns (DR) as well as offered at the very end of a complete run. The changes were done to discourage players from exploiting certain dungeon bosses and environments in order to skip certain fights, and run through areas as quickly as possible, multiple times, to farm tokens. This may seem like a good intention in theory, since the system will undoubtedly see subsequent changes once ArenaNet’s team actually fixes the exploits.

Except for the fact that, well, the DR system– and the changes that occurred– seem… not quite right. Instead of seeing diminishing returns for super-fast dungeon completion runs (less than 30 mins) that are ran back-to-back, as intended, some players are seeing diminishing returns on the amount of tokens they receive the first time through. And the second time through, even though their run took far longer than 30 minutes. There are also players who are finding themselves kicked out of groups right before the final boss so their groupmates can quickly grab a friend who can then earn the completion rewards, leaving the original player who battled through the entire dungeon empty-handed.

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Let me try and clarify myself a bit more. Death Shroud is very powerful because it gives Necromancer access to a secondary health bar which is is much more reliably renewable than normal health is for other professions. On top of that it essentially also gives them a 3rd weapon set that they can use to circumvent the basic weapon swap cooldown to reliably bounce between powerful skills in 3 different sets. For both of these reasons, Necromancer has a high power ceiling but also an extremely high learning curve.

In the current condition heavy meta-game, there is a lot of condition removal. The problem this is causing for Necromancers is that they do not have a lot of build diversity in this meta, because they don’t have any great power builds they can turn to. What I would like to try and do is increase build diversity without increasing effectiveness because I don’t believe we have really seen what strong Necromancers can do yet.

Hopefully that explains a bit where we stand. We are still working towards getting rid of all of the bugs in everyone’s skills and traits at which point we can get a much better idea of where everyone stands. That time will also give us the chance to see where the large amount of current players actually takes the meta game.
Jon

GW2 Hub has published a great interview with Jon Peters in regards to class balance and the overall balance of the game. There are some interesting tidbits for everyone. One point that stood out was an update on the Engineers:

Lewis B: I was enjoying the engineer over the last few phases as it’s so fun to play, but have developed a list of concerns or issues, especially around kits, the tool belt, and trait line synergy. I think out of all the professions in the game it needs some tweaks at the moment. Can we expect any changes or significant improvements over the next few patches? I noticed their traits have had a tidy up…

Jon: The engineer is the first profession we have addressed since the last BWE. Changes have been made to many skills and to the trait lines as well. The previous list of traits contained many holdovers from the old trait system that did not fit into the new tier paradigm.

Read the rest of the interview at GW2Hub.

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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This is a general rule of our skill system. AoE attacks hit up to 5 targets. AoE buffs or heals can heal up to 5. We cap it at 5 because its the party size and lets us reign in the balance on AoE without impacting most normal situations. WvW is the one place where this shows up, but we believe the alternative is worse. Hope this helps…

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Hey all. I wanted to talk about this a bit since it is a hot topic here and also on the internets. The intention is that both styles are viable. Certainly right now Melee is more difficult than ranged. There are some things we will try to do to address this, but I think the more you play you would find they are closer than you think.
First what’s already there:

1) Melee does more damage. Melee damage is simply higher than ranged damage across the board.
2) Melee has more control. With a few intentional exception Melee has a lot more control than ranged.
What Melee needs:
1) defensive tools on more weapons, particularly on lower armor professions.
2) ai needs to favor Melee a bit less than it currently does.

What else:
Finally because of the more action based nature of combat Melee needs to be taught better. Effective Melee requires skills that translate over from FPS games which are notoriously harder on casual players. You have to wasd to move, constantly aim with your mouse camera, and hit skills on 1-5.
Some tips:

If you have learned any good Melee tips that you think we should pass on to newer players feel free to post them here. I’ll start with a few tips of my own.

- If you don’t have mouse look on when using a skill you will turn to face. I sometimes let go of mouse look as I activate to help me aim through the chaos and then click it back down in between attacks.
- Melee has a lot of hard hitting skills and good setup. Utility skills Can really help set up big Melee attacks. Bulls charge on warrior, scorpion wire on thief, judges intervention on guardian.
- know when to run. No matter what you are not a tank. You have to move in and out avoiding damage. If you have to soak damage try and bring boons like Protection and Regeneration or conditions like Blindness and the very undervalued Weakness.

Thanks for reading this all. Rest assured we will keep working on this and just keep in mind the subtle differences in GW2 combat that take a while to sink in.
Jon

Today, GW2Hub put out their second part of their interview with Jon Peters where they discussed a bit of everything from social interaction to changes in the game. Here’s a quick clip:

Sardu: And that kind of interaction also helps promote more of the social aspects of the game which are obviously very important in GW2.

Jon Peters: I played in the beta weekends before the Prophecies release, and now I’ve been able to play in the beta events for GW2 as well. What’s interesting is that we’re currently right back in that stage where people are deeply theorycrafting builds, deciding what the cornerstones of X build should be based on Y.

So we’re seeing that exact same cycle repeat itself now, and I expect that will be even more the case when the next beta event hits. At that point, a lot of theorycrafted builds will be put into action and people will begin to discover why they may or may not work the way they expected.

Source: Traits and Builds Interview with Jon Peters Pt. 2

After the MMORPG.com panel on Saturday, Sardu from Guildwars2hub.com got a chance to talk to Jon Peters on traits and builds. Make sure you read the full article for all the details. Here’s a little snippet:

Sardu: Between the press closed beta (CBT2) and the more recent closed beta event (CBT3) I noted there were a lot of changes to traits. The overall system mechanics remained largely the same, but could you talk a bit about some of the specific changes to the traits themselves?

Jon Peters: In the first of those events we had enough placeholder traits to show the process of how you would click on certain slots and there would be choices. That’s basically what those were for. So for the second one (CBT3) it was more like this is how many choices you’re going to have and most of these are real, so all of those were actually built in that three week span in between tests.

Source: Traits and Builds Interview with Jon Peters

From Gamestar.de:

Guild Wars 2 Interview: In our interview with gamedesigners Jon Peters and Ben Miller from ArenaNet we discuss the endgame of Guild Wars 2, matchmaking, guilds, tournaments and the engineer.

MMORPG.com has partnered with the Guild Wars 2 team for an exclusive Live Stream Q&A with Jon Peters at 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) about professions and traits in Guild Wars 2. We’ve compiled your questions to ask during the interview.

** UPDATE #2** The interview has been posted to youtube and added to this post.

PVP class balance:

• They believe utility is spread around evenly to all the classes, and the majority of current balancing is just playing the numbers game. AE’s he expects will be ineffective in pvp vs good players.
• To counter the healing all classes have, poison is a healing debuff. Through combos every class can get poison attached to their attacks. Necro and Thief have posion as base skills.

ZAM published an interview with Jon Peters today where they discussed general game play and the eSports side of things in regards to Guild Wars 2. Here are a few snippets we found interest, but make sure you read the full interview by following this link.

ZAM: Given Guild Wars’ renown as a competitive PvP-focused game, will there be any plans to extend that competitiveness to PvE encounters? Something like leaderboards for completing elite events and dungeons the fastest?

Jon: We did do some stuff like this in Guild Wars: Factions so it is something we do enjoy. However, there are no current plans for this.

ZAM: Speaking of competitive team-based PvP, eSports has been making a big push into the public sphere, with more players turning to streams to generate consistent revenue while playing in tournaments for the prestige and bigger cash prizes. Do you have any major plans to support eSports gaming in Guild Wars 2 that you can share?

Jon: Absolutely. We consider it to be one of the primary goals of Guild Wars 2 competitive PvP to make it into an eSport. We plan to have daily tournaments, monthly tourneys and a yearly world championship. I can’t give out tons of details on these yet, but I just wanted you guys to know that we plan to have these things and support them.

Today, Jon Peters, Game Designer for Arenanet, published a new dev blog titled, “Play Your Way – Jon Peters on Traits and Attributes“. This fantastic blog details all the stats in the game and most importantly the Trait System. The trait system in Guild Wars 2 is exactly what the talent system is in WOW, Rift or TOR.

Elementalist

• Fire Magic: Power and Expertise.
• Air Magic: Precision and Prowess.
• Earth Magic: Toughness and Malice.
• Water Magic: Vitality and Compassion.
• Arcane Power: Concentration and Intelligence.

Each class gets five trait lines that augment a certain segment of a class’s abilities. For example, the elementalist is broken down into, if you can guess, Elements (as seen above). Water has healing capabilities while Fire does more damage. Each trait line has 30 points, it consists of 3 minor traits and 3 major traits. These do all sorts of different things that augment your character. If you want to dive deep into the Warrior Discipline tree, check out the dev blog.

Speccing out your character can determine your play style from offense to defense or support.