Still plugging away at the Guild Wars 2, so if you are on the fence or looking for something fun to play on your PC, pick up the game and play with me! I started playing with a few friends this fall, all of whom now appear to have dropped the game entirely, so for the past couple of months, as I have been logging in to complete my daily quests and get some alt-characters up to level 80, it's just been me running about by myself.
This past week I also tried out the free PvP tournaments for the first time. These are 5v5 matches where you can either form a team in advance or solo queue and be thrown into a PUG (pick-up-group) and then you compete in either 1 or Best-of-3 rounds for big cash and prizes (note: the big cash and prizes are a lie). This mode taught me a few things: First, I am apparently a total scrub at PvP. Like many players, I can often score top of the charts in the hot join, regular PvP matches (talking about SPvP here, in case this was not clear). But the tournament matches are another beast entirely. I am blown up easily, frequently, and often with little clue as to how. I get stunned, rooted, and downed in a brilliant shower of particle effects from who-knows-where. My PvP level is only 12, and from what I've seen, I am often up against level 50+ players or teams, so I do expect to improve over time, but still. Not so fun to be shouting "WTF!?" at my screen.
Second--and really the point I want to write about--is that I notice that after the match starts, I am restricted from changing out my weapon sets (and maybe my slot skills too, I will have to check this). For those who may not know, in Guild Wars 2, half of your character abilities are tied to the equipped weapons. In regular, non-tournament PvP, these can be changed anytime you are not in combat, so that you can dynamically adjust your skills, either in response to what other players are doing or for any other reason.
Removing this functionality from the high-level PvP play is, I think, a mistake, for very similar reasons as I've written about before. I don't want to rehearse that entire argument again here, but locking players into pre-game decisions or strategies seems like a generally bad approach to competitive game design. To draw on the basketball analogy again, it would be like forcing a team to stick with a man-to-man defense (which they had practiced all week, say) despite an obvious advantage of switching to zone after the game is underway.
I suspect this functionality is removed to place greater emphasis on the pre-match strategy and coordination. Indeed, this was the bread-and-butter of the original Guild Wars' guild-versus-guild (GvG) system: You had 8 players on your team, none of whose skills could be swapped after the match had begun, so you needed to construct a slick team build that balanced specificity--that is, the ability to execute a particular victory strategy--with adaptability--the ability to respond to a variety of possible opponent strategies. Although I cannot speak to the ultra-competitive, top-tier GvG matches, my experience with this locked-in system was mixed: Some matches you had simply out-built your opponent and so you would steam roll them. Some matches just the reverse. But the most fun and exciting, were, of course, those games where the two teams had appropriately balanced builds and the victory was due to dynamic decisions and execution, rather than pre-game strategic decisions.
In other words, good matches were those when the pre-game strategy became largely irrelevant. And this brings me to the material point: A good game emphasizes the decisions made while playing, not the decisions made before the game begins. As a rule, it is simply less fun to have lost a match before it has really even begun; far better to have teams start on equal footing (or close to it) and structure the game such that victory flows to the team that actually plays the game better.
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