GuildCast 26: ArenaNet Makes Traits and Skills Changes To Guild Wars 2

> They needed to restrict things with the tiers so that you couldn’t
> make those OP builds that people made in the last beta through
> the combination of certain major traits.

Well, yes and no. They had at least two other options:

a) Keep the current major traits but adjust them so they all have approximately the same “value”. 

b) Move any “overpowered” bonus to the highest tiers of the _minor_ traits, so they would no longer be a choice, and would just be a natural reward for spending more points on a specific trait line. 

A couple of obvious problems with the new system are that it’s going to make the “power curve” steeper (which is bad for WvW balance) and is going to limit the different builds that people will try. Let’s face it, if your first major trait slot gives you access to traits 1-6 and the second gives you access to traits 1-10, no one is going to pick one of the first 6 options for the second slot. By grouping them into tiers, Arena Net is clearly saying “traits 7-10 are better than traits 1-6″. Which has to make you wonder why don’t they simply make traits 1-6 slightly better (or 7-10 slightly worse) and still let people choose the traits they want.

Or just have completely different traits available for each slot (ex., slot 1 gets traits 1-6, slot 2 gets traits 7-10, slot 3 gets traits 11-12). That would at least be more honest.

> it prevents you from getting the strongest abilities
> right at the beginning

That’s what the skill price is there for. If I choose to save my first 6 points (for example) and spend them on a single 6-point skill instead of three 2-point skills, that should be a perfectly valid decision. If Arena Net thinks that single 6-point still is more useful than the other three 2-point skills, they can either adjust their effect or change their cost. 

There is absolutely no need to force players to spend currency they earned (skill points) on skills that they do not want. It’s as if a car dealer forced you to buy a compact car and a sedan before letting you buy a truck, even though you already know that you’re planning to drive off-road (and have no use for the first two). It’s just bad design.

Tiering makes sense when the skills in tier 2 are improved versions of the skills in tier 1 (and so on), but in GW2 all skills are different, so that doesn’t apply. It’s just one extra layer that’s going to reduce variety and annoy players (by forcing them to buy things they don’t want).

> As for the utility skills – I really don’t see what the problem is
> as eventually you will have everything unlocked anyways.

You can use the same argument in WoW: “Anything that happens while leveling is irrelevant because at max level you’ll be doing completely different things anyway.”

That’s just not GW2′s philosophy; what got people (including journalists) interested in the game was that GW2 was designed to let you “play the way you want to play from day one”. 

> it addresses that overload that most players seem to
> be facing when they first go into the skills menu

Well, assuming they go into the skills menu when they first get a skill point, they will only have the option of buying the 1-point skills anyway, so the “overload” will be exactly identical.

I don’t know a single player who was “overwhelmed”, but if indeed those mysterious creatures exist, they’re free to unlock the skills in the order they appear on the screen, for example. The rest of us have the ability to read tooltips, and should not be punished for it by being forced to spend the currency we earned on something we don’t want.

Anyway, Arena Net had “achievement chests” in the closed betas but ended up removing them when people told them how silly it was, so if people make their voices heard there’s hope that they’ll get rid of the “tiering” and just concentrate on balancing things properly instead, so the choices people make can be about style of play rather than “powering up”.

> Most people are not familiar with the system
> so Anet has to put in barriers to ease people into the game.

I’m sure you can see the irony of “putting in barriers” to “ease the entry” into the game.

> Freedom is great until you start taking the guard rails
> off the bridge and have people jump off….

Not sure how that metaphor can be applied to tiered skills in GW2, but the rails on bridges aren’t there to prevent people from jumping; people who want to jump can climb the rails easily. The rails are there to avoid people (and cars, etc.) falling off accidentally.

>  I’m playing Devil Advocate here (somebody has to….right?

I’m sure the devil has no lack of lawyers where he lives.

> I’ve seen alot of players unlock a couple skill points and then
> go into the hero panel, look at the 20+ skills available and just
> go WTF am I supposed to do/use.

The whole point is that you’re not “supposed” to use anything in particular. You _can_ pick anything. And you’ll end up unlocking everything, in time, so it doesn’t even matter in the long run – you just start by picking the ones you find more interesting, after reading the tooltips. 

When you open a restaurant’s menu, do you think “WTF am I supposed to eat”…? No, you read the dish names / descriptions and pick one that seems appealing. Or you’ll ask someone else who has already tried them what he or she recommends.

You don’t ask the restaurant owner to put the dishes into “tiers” so that you have to start by eating 5 soups before you can have a salad, and then eat 5 salads before you can have a steak.

> unfortunately it seems the average person isn’t all that bright

Even more depressing is that half the people are dumber than the average person!

> As for WvW – it’s not supposed to be balanced so [...]

If it wasn’t “supposed” to be balanced at all, they wouldn’t level people up to 80. It’s not supposed to be a 100% level playing field (ex., it’s designed to be playable with unbalanced team sizes), but obviously the closer it is, the more it will be about skill (and that’s what most people want – or say they want), so anything that increases the “power” of higher level players is going to make the experience of new players worse.

> the actual slots don’t become available to use
> until levels 10, 15, 20 and 30 anyways 

In other words, players’ “power” is _already_ limited by that (and by the cost of the skills). Which makes another restriction (tiering) nonsensical, especially when it kills variety and goes against GW2′s original promise: “letting people play their character the way they want right from the start”.

If they think some skills are too powerful, nerf them, improve the weak ones, or adjust their cost. Forcing people to spend currency they earned on something they don’t want is just bad design (in games as in the real world – it’s actually illegal in some cases), and has a distinct smell of WoW about it which doesn’t bode well for GW2′s design in the long run.

> you don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem but apparently there
> were a lot of people in the last beta that did have this problem

I keep reading that, but it’s always “some people” or “other people”. It’s never the person actually talking about it. It feels a bit like a patronizing excuse (“I don’t have a problem, but I’m surrounded by idiots and I’m sure most of them can’t handle this mind-blowing intellectual challenge of reading 20 sentences…”).

And it works as an excuse for the developers, too. “It’s not that they’re not able to balance things properly – or admit they can’t think of 20 useful skills – they have to restrict choice because of some feeble-brained noobs…”

No. Your job is to balance the bloody skills, or admit that you’re aiming too high and just reduce the number. Don’t pretend to give me a choice of 20 different options and then force me to pick 15 that I don’t want. That’s just dishonest.

> I guess if I go by the restaurant menu analogy it would be along
> the lines of having a Chef’s Recommended sections or asking
> the server what he suggests.

Exactly. This is an MMO. Ask (in chat) and you shall receive. But, just as the chef might “recommend” something he likes but you don’t, the same will happen in the game. The whole point of having well-balanced skills is that the one you pick will be purely a matter of personal taste, and won’t make you noticeably “stronger” or “weaker” than other players. If some skill does that, it needs to be rebalanced or removed, just as a dish that no one orders needs to be changed or removed from the restaurant menu.

> Their was actually a really nice post on reddit by the devs on this topic.

Oh, I’m sure from their point of view saying “we’re doing this because we’re nice to the poor little players” sounds much better than saying “we’re doing this because we don’t want to admit that half the skills we created weren’t appealing”. 

Developers always prefer to add more layers of “damage control” than come clean and say they’re going to remove or replace something that didn’t work. That doesn’t make it the best solution, just the easiest one. Just look at the mess that WoW’s talents became. You get 41 points to spend on 60 slots (with multiple levels each) but so many restrictions that everyone ends up with the same builds. 

> Glad to see that they are atleast addressing
> people’s worries and not just ignoring us.

Again, no one I know was “worried” about being able to pick any skill they wanted. In fact, that freedom was one of the things that got players and journalists excited about GW2, and gave Arena Net a lot of free publicity. People may have thought that a few skills were a bit overpowered, and that others weren’t very interesting, but that’s a completely different issue. If some choices are objectively “better” than others, that’s just a matter of tweaking them.

And even if they don’t tweak them, so what? As long as everyone has access to the same choices, the playing field is fair.

It’s almost as if game developers think that rewarding players for their intelligence is a bad thing  (where “intelligence”, in this case, simply means the ability to read the tooltips and make a choice).

> Finally an important point is that balance creates more choice
> as well because unbalanced and bad builds aren’t really options.

This makes no sense. I would almost describe it as “mathematically false”. Pick any “bad” trait build from the previous system and you’ll see it’s still possible using the new system. It’s the “good” builds that stopped being options. Instead of improving (or simply removing) the “bad” ones, they now force you to pick those.

The only way they could prevent “bad” builds would be by restricting the first tier to the BEST traits / skills. That would force everyone to pick at least five “good” skills and at least one “good” trait. But what they are doing is exactly the opposite. This means the “bad” builds are all still perfectly possible. 

It really bothers me to see people fall for this kind of (false) logic: “Some abilities are better than others, so we must restrict people to the bad ones, or they won’t pick them”. No, you lazy designer, go improve the bad ones. Don’t pretend you have nothing to do with their design and are just trying to save players from someone else’s mistakes. Give people a _reason_ to pick them. Being force-fed something doesn’t make it taste better. And if you can’t cook 20 good dishes, just admit that and let us pick from the 5 or 10 that you _can_ cook.